GraphQL is a standard for declaring data structures and methods of data access that serves as a middleware layer between the client and the server. If you’ve never heard about GraphQL, here is a couple of useful online resources: here, here and here.

In this article, I will tell you how you can use GraphQL in your projects based on InterSystems technologies.

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Everybody has a testing environment.

Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

-- Unknown

.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab WorkFlow
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • CI/CD with containers

This first part deals with the cornerstone of modern software development - Git version control system and various Git flows.

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Index to Articles

Hi All

It's been 6 weeks since my original article sad
- - - - -but I have been busy on this project

I have been looking at/thinking about a replacement for ZEN for around 12 months but only really started in depth 4 months ago.
Also been in IT for long enough that I can "get a feel" for a product/technology and make decisions accordingly without going into great detail.
Any new technology has a learning curve and I don't want to waste time and effort on something that won't fly.
And, as always, I am looking to minimise the learning curve as I want to concentrate on delivering business benefit.

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*** archived ***

The question has come up several times and I saw mixed answers and no quick example

My personal preference is using CPIPE device as you get back exactly the output you will get at the command line interface of your OS .
The tricky thing is to stop reading in time.
The example just displays what you normally see in your console.
it becomes useful if you look for things that you can't get from any $system.whatever()

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Index to Articles

Published 2018-05-11 Last edit -

Hi All

I this article I detail some strategic issues that a new development UI will need to address - these are the ones that I can think of now - others may come to light during this journey.

See the webinar by Eduard Lebedyuk here from the last Global Summit describing modern web development and Caché

And, as always, if I have missed something please comment....

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InterSystems Data Platform includes utilities and tools for system monitoring and alerting, however System Administrators new to solutions built on the InterSystems Data Platform (a.k.a Caché) need to know where to start and what to configure.

This guide shows the path to a minimum monitoring and alerting solution using references from online documentation and developer community posts to show you how to enable and configure the following;

  1. Caché Monitor: Scans the console log and sends emails alerts.

  2. System Monitor: Monitors system status and resources, generating notifications (alerts and warnings) based on fixed parameters and also tracks overall system health.

  3. Health Monitor: Samples key system and user-defined metrics and compares them to user-configurable parameters and established normal values, generating notifications when samples exceed applicable or learned thresholds.

  4. History Monitor: Maintains a historical database of performance and system usage metrics.

  5. pButtons: Operating system and Caché metrics collection scheduled daily.

Remember this guide is a minimum configuration, the included tools are flexible and extensible so more functionality is available when needed. This guide skips through the documentation to get you up and going. You will need to dive deeper into the documentation to get the most out of the monitoring tools, in the meantime, think of this as a set of cheat sheets to get up and running.

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I bet that not everyone familiar with InterSystems Caché knows about Studio extensions for working with the source code. You can actually use the Studio to create your own type of source code, compile it into interpretable (INT) and object code, and sometimes even add code completion support. That is, theoretically, you can make the Studio support any programming language that will be executed by the DBMS just as well as Caché ObjectScript. In this article, I will give you a simple example of writing programs in Caché Studio using a language that resembles JavaScript. If you are interested, please read along.

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Article
· Mar 18, 2018 1m read
Replacing ZEN - Index to articles

Hi All
This is the index to a series of articles I hope to create over the coming months.

ZEN and ZEN Mojo are no longer being actively developed by Intesystems - this is a great shame as it is a fine product that works so well for business applications.
However ZEN is a 15 year old product and I need a path forward to replace the ZEN UI with a supported development framework.

This article is an index of the other articles I have, or plan to write. - the articles will be subject to change as I develop my thoughts and climb the learning curve.

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Astronomers’ tools

5 years ago, on December 19, 2013, the ESA launched an orbital telescope called Gaia. Learn more about the Gaia mission on the official website of the European Space Agency or in the article by Vitaly Egorov (Billion pixels for a billion stars).

However, few people know what technology the agency chose for storing and processing the data collected by Gaia. Two years before the launch, in 2011, the developers were considering a number of candidates (see “Astrostatistics and Data Mining” by Luis Manuel Sarro, Laurent Eyer, William O’Mullane, Joris De Ridder, pp. 111-112):

Comparing the technologies side-by-side produced the following results (source):

Technology Time
DB2 13min55s
PostgreSQL 8 14min50s
PostgreSQL 9 6min50s
Hadoop 3min37s
Cassandra 3min37s
Caché 2min25s

The first four will probably sound familiar even to schoolchildren. But what is Caché XEP?

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Some time ago I got a WRC case transferred where a customer asks for the availability of a raw DEFLATE compression/decompression function built-in Caché.

When we talk about DEFLATE we need to talk about Zlib as well, since Zlib is the de-facto standard free compression/decompression library developed in the mid-90s.

Zlib works on particular DEFLATE compression/decompression algorithm and the idea of encapsulation within a wrapper (gzip, zlib, etc.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib

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What if you could serialize/deserialize objects in whatever format: JSON, XML, CSV,...; attending different criteria: export/import some properties and not others, transform values in this or that way before exporting/importing,...; and all of this without having to change the class definition? Wouldn't that be great??

Well, perhaps it's a goal too ambitious to reach 100% but, exploring this idea, I've developed a bunch of classes that I thought it was good to share. If you want to test, change, modify or improve the code, or just take a look at it, you can do it here. There you'll find a more detailed explanation (see Readme.md)

Be aware, this is a proof of concept for myself done in spare times, sure it's not robust enough or it can be done much better... but, I was just playing...ok, I could just wait to the new JSON Adaptor (coming soon!) that sure is going to resolve much more scenarios in a cleaner way, but... meanwhile... :-) ...

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • Why containers?
  • Containers infrastructure
  • CD using containers

In the first article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software.

In the second article, we covered GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process and Continuous Delivery.

In the third article, we covered GitLab installation and configuration and connecting your environments to GitLab

In the fourth article, we wrote a CD configuration.

In the fifth article, we talked about containers and how (and why) they can be used.

In the sixth article let's discuss main components you'll need to run a continuous delivery pipeline with containers and how they all work together.

In this article, we'll build Continuous Delivery configuration discussed in the previous articles.

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In this article, I would show how you can upload and download files from InterSystems products via http.

The questions about working with files over http arise fairly often on community and I'm usually linking to my FileServer project which demonstrates file upload/download but I'd like to talk a bit more on how we can serve and receive files from InterSystems products.

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This article was written as an attempt to share the experience of installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for production environment.
We all know that the development configuration of a DBMS is very different from real-life conditions.
As a rule, development is carried out in “hothouse conditions” with a bare minimum of security measures, but when we publish our project online, we must ensure its reliable and uninterrupted operation in a very aggressive environment.

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InterSystems products (IRIS, Caché, Ensemble) already include a built-in Apache web server. But the built-in server is designed for the development and administration tasks and thus has certain limitations. Though you may find some useful workarounds for these limitations, the more common approach is to deploy a full-scale web server for your production environment. This article describes how to set up Apache to work with InterSystems products and how to provide HTTPS access. We will be using Ubuntu, but the configuration process is almost the same for all Linux distributions.

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NOTE: This content was originally presented at the InterSystems Global Summit in 2014, however related topics often come up on the Developer Community so I have decided to turn this into an article for easier reference and discussion. However, much of the content was pulled directly from the presentation slides so the article format resembles that of a PPT deck more than paragraphs.

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Some weeks ago, I was reading a book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design. At a certain point, trying to define why do we exist? , why do we use the models we use in physics?, ...those kind of things you know... they pointed at the Game of Life example invented by the mathematician John Coward in 1970... Basically he wanted to show that a system with really basic fundamental laws (Physics) could evolve and "live" to become a more complex system (Chemistry) in which "something" (humans) could work out its own model and complex rules to explain its reality… the rules for this deterministic model that he exposed were so basic that I thought it could be funny to implement them in ObjectScript when I had some spare time... there are others implementations in JavaScript and other languages... but not in ObjectScript... and that had to be corrected!!… so here you are!

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD

In the previous article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software. Still, our focus was on the implementation part of software development, but this part presents:

  • GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process - from idea to user feedback
  • Continuous Delivery - software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently.

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I already talked about GraphQL and the ways of using it in this article. Now I am going to tell you about the tasks I was facing and the results that I managed to achieve in the process of implementing GraphQL for InterSystems platforms.

What this article is about

  • Generation of an AST for a GraphQL request and its validation
  • Generation of documentation
  • Generation of a response in the JSON format
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Article
· Mar 14, 2018 10m read
REST Design and Development

Intro

For many in today's interoperability landscape, REST reigns supreme. With the overabundance of tools and approaches to REST API development, what tools do you choose and what do you need to plan for before writing any code?
This article focuses on design patterns and considerations that allow you to build highly robust, adaptive, and consistent REST APIs. Viable approaches to challenges of CORS support and authentication management will be discussed, along with various tips and tricks and best tools for all stages of REST API development. Learn about the open-source REST APIs available for InterSystems IRIS Data Platform and how they tackle the challenge of ever-increasing API complexity.
The article is a write-up for a recent webinar on the same topic.

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This post provides useful links and an overview of best practice configuration for low latency storage IO by creating LVM Physical Extent (PE) stripes for database disks on InterSystems Data Platforms; InterSystems IRIS, Caché, and Ensemble.

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Generally speaking, InterSystems products supported dynamic objects and JSON for a long while, but version 2016.2 came with a completely new implementation of these features, and the corresponding code was moved from the ObjectScript level to the kernel/C level, which made for a substantial performance boost in these areas. This article is about innovations in the new version and the migration process (including the ways of preserving backward compatibility).

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There are numerous ways to interact with InterSystems Caché: We can start with ODBC/JDBC that are available via SQL gateway. There are API for .NET and Java too. But if we need to work with native binary libraries, such interaction is  possible through Caché Callout Gateway, which can be tricky. You can read more about the ways of facilitating the work with native libraries directly from Caché in the article below.

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