Everybody has a testing environment.

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

-- Unknown

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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
• 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.

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
• GitLab CI/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 this 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 series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.

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.

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 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 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.

Keywords:  IRIS, IntegratedML, Flask, FastAPI, Tensorflow Serving, HAProxy, Docker, Covid-19

Purpose:

We touched on some quick demos of  deep learning and machine learning over the past few months, including a simple Covid-19 X-Ray image classifier and a Covid-19  lab result classifier for possible ICU admissions.  We also touched on an IntegratedML demo implementation of the ICU classifier.

It is with great pleasure that the CIUSSS de l'Estrie - CHUS is sharing the mocking framework it developed and presented at the InterSystems Summit 2017.  I will update this post with more detailed instructions in the next few weeks but I wanted to share the code and presentation quickly : 

https://gitlab.com/ciussse-drit-srd-public/Mocking-Framework

I hope you'll find this useful for your unit testing. We are using this extensively for the last 2 years and it really works well! The repo is public, feel free to submit enhancements!

Do not forget to enable the %UnitTest in your SMP.

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 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.

I this article we'll discuss:

• GitLab installation and configuration
• Connecting your environments to GitLab

This article will describe processes for running unit tests via the InterSystems Package Manager (aka IPM - see https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/InterSystems-Package-Manager-1), including test coverage measurement (via https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/Test-Coverage-Tool).

Unit testing in ObjectScript

There's already great documentation about writing unit tests in ObjectScript, so I won't repeat any of that. You can find the Unit Test tutorial here: https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls?

The Widgets Direct sample application highlights many aspects of how to use InterSystems technologies to build a modern web application.

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?
• GitLab CI/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 this article, let's talk about containers and how (and why) they can be used.

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
• CD using ICM
• Container architecture

In this article, we would talk about building your own container and deploying it.

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
• CD using ICM

In this article, we'll build Continuous Delivery with InterSystems Cloud Manager. ICM is a cloud provisioning and deployment solution for applications based on InterSystems IRIS. It allows you to define the desired deployment configuration and ICM would provision it automatically. For more information take a look at First Look: ICM.

Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. Today, we continue talking about Interoperability, specifically monitoring your Interoperability deployments. If you haven't yet, set up Alerting for all your Interoperability productions to get alerts about errors and production state in general.

Inactivity Timeout is a setting common to all Interoperability Business Hosts. A business host has an Inactive status after it has not received any messages within the number of seconds specified by the Inactivity Timeout field. The production Monitor Service periodically reviews the status of business services and business operations within the production and marks the item as Inactive if it has not done anything within the Inactivity Timeout period. The default value is 0 (zero). If this setting is 0, the business host will never be marked Inactive, no matter how long it stands idle.

In the vast and varied SQL database market, InterSystems IRIS stands out as a platform that goes way beyond just SQL, offering a seamless multimodel experience and supporting a rich set of development paradigms. Especially the advanced Object-Relational engine has helped organizations use the best-fit development approach for each facet of their data-intensive workloads, for example ingesting data through Objects and simultaneously querying it through SQL. Persistent Classes correspond to SQL tables, their properties to table columns and business logic is easily accessed using User-Defined Functions or Stored Procedures. In this article, we'll zoom in on a little bit of the magic just below the surface, and discuss how it may affect your development and deployment practices. This is an area of the product where we have plans to evolve and improve, so please don't hesitate to share your views and experiences using the comments section below.

A lot of developers like to work with Studio and have been looking into source code version control such as GIT or into enabling modern development workflows like CICD or DevOps processes.

This article describe an elementary solution to get you started in CICD and DevOps, even if you are not yet ready to move to Atelier or forth coming VS Code approach which enable client side source code version control.

Introduction

In a previous article, I discussed patterns for running unit tests via the  InterSystems Package Manager. This article goes a step further, using GitHub actions to drive test execution and reporting. The motivating use case is running CI for one of my Open Exchange projects, AppS.REST (see the introductory article for it here). You can see the full implementation from which the snippets in this article were taken on GitHub; it could easily serve as a template for running CI for other projects using the ObjectScript package manager.

IRIS configurations and user accounts contain various data elements that need to be tracked, and many people struggle to copy or sync those system configurations and user accounts between IRIS instances. So how can this process be simplified?

In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD is the set of combined practices of continuous integration (CI) and (more often) continuous delivery or (less often) continuous deployment (CD). Can CI/CD eliminate all our struggles?

I work in a team which develops and deploys IRIS clusters. We run IRIS in containers on Red Hat OpenShift container platform.

This is a continuation of my story about the development of my project isc-tar started in the first part.

Just having tests is not enough, it does not mean that you will run tests after all changes. Running tests should be automated, and when you cover all your functionality with tests, everything should work well after any change in any place.  And Continuous Integration (CI) helps to keep the code and deployment procedure with as fewer bugs as possible and automates the routine procedures, like publishing releases.

I use GitHub to store the source code. And some time ago GitHub started to work on its own CI/CD platform and named it GitHub Actions. It is not widely available, yet. You have to be signed as a beta tester for this feature, as I did. GitHub Actions uses quite a different way how to deal with a build workflow. What is important that Github Actions allows to use Docker, and it’s quite easy to customize available actions. And interesting that GitHub Actions is really much bigger than any classic CI like we have in Travis, Circle or Gitlab CI and so on. You can find more in the official documentation.

Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.

Today, let's talk about interoperability.

Issue

When you have an active interoperability production, you have two separate process flows: a working production that processes messages and a CI/CD process flow that updates code, production configuration and system default settings.

Clearly, CI/CD process affects interoperability. But questions are:

• What exactly happens during an update?
• What do we need to do to minimize or eliminate production downtime during an update?

When you deploy code from a repo, class (file) deletion might not be reflected by your CICD system.
Here's a simple one-liner to automatically delete all classes in a specified package that have not been imported. It can be easily adjusted for a variety of adjunct tasks:

set packages = "USER.*,MyCustomPackage.*"
set dir = "C:\InterSystems\src\"
set sc = $SYSTEM.OBJ.LoadDir(dir,"ck", .err, 1, .loaded)
set sc = $SYSTEM.OBJ.Delete(packages _ ",'" _ $LTS($LI($LFS(loaded_",",".cls,"), 1, *-1), ",'"), "/generated=0", .err2)

The first command compiles classes and also returns a list of loaded classes. The second command deletes all classes from specified packages, except for the classes loaded just before that. Any generated classes are also skipped since they won't be in the loaded list.

Overview

This web interface is designed to facilitate the management of Data Lookup Tables via a user-friendly web page. It is particularly useful when your lookup table values are large, dynamic, and frequently changing. By granting end-users controlled access to this web interface (read, write, and delete permissions limited to this page), they can efficiently manage lookup table data according to their needs.

The data managed through this interface can be seamlessly utilized in HealthConnect rules or data transformations, eliminating the need for constant manual monitoring and management of the lookup tables and thereby saving significant time.

Note:
If the standard Data Lookup Table does not meet your mapping requirements, you can create a custom table and adapt this web interface along with its supporting class with minimal modifications. Sample class code is available upon request.

Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.

Today I want to share a few approaches that will decrease your compilation time (especially if you're doing incremental/diff compilation rather than a full build).

Compiler flags and qualifiers

Code load and compilation are affected by a variety of flags and qualifiers. If you write deployment scripts for InterSystems platforms, I highly recommend reading them at least once through.