#Development Environment

Why SSH ?

If you do not have direct access to the server that runs your IRIS Docker container
you still may require access to the container outside "iris session" or "WebTerminal".
With an SSH terminal (PuTTY, KiTTY,.. ) you get access inside Docker, and then, depending
on your needs you run "iris session iris" or display/manipulate files directly.

Note:

Hi Developers!

Many of you publish your InterSystems ObjectScript libraries on Open Exchange and Github.

But what do you do to ease the usage and collaboration to your project for developers?

In this article, I want to introduce the way how to introduce an easy way to launch and contribute to any ObjectScript project just by copying a standard set of files to your repository.

Let's go!

It's been 6 months since InterSystems released Atelier 1.0 and we continue to roll out enhancements and new features through the beta channel (please see the Atelier Download page for details). In the meantime, we have received a lot of messages from the Developer Community with ideas for further improvements. Based on your feedback, we created a roadmap for Atelier 1.1 so you can conveniently track when specific features are going to be integrated.

Hi ISC Community!

I'm pleased to announce new release of Caché Web Terminal 3.1.4.

What's new:

1. Drag'n'drop to Studio installation: just import xml in any namespace.

2. After import and comilation access your web terminal app on URL server:port/terminal/.

F.e. localhost:57772/terminal/

Slash is mandatory.

3. No need to use %CACHELIB anymore - please feel free to update your Caché and continue using CWT.

Hi Devs!

Recently I was impressed by @Daniel.Pasco's article where he shares also how he uses terminal aliases.

Terminal aliases is a very powerful tool for developers and sys admins if you often need to call some cumbersome terminal expressions and make it shorter and cleaner. Here is the documentation.
Yes!

But what about Docker environments? What if you are fan of Docker dev environments but also want to keep using your favorite aliases with Docker as well?

Turned out it is very possible.

This time I want to talk about something not specific to InterSystems IRIS, but that I think is important if you want to work with Docker and your server at work is a PC or laptop with Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise.

As you likely know, containers technology comes basically from Linux world and, nowadays, is on Linux hosts were it shows maximum potential. Those who use Windows on a normal basis see that both, Microsoft and Docker, have done important efforts during these last years that allow us to run containers based on Linux images on our Windows system in a really easy way... but it's something not supported for production systems and, this is the big problem, is not reliable if we want to keep persistent data outside of containers, in the host system,... mostly due to the big differences between Windows and Linux file systems. In the end, Docker for Windows itself uses a small linux virtual machine (MobiLinux) to run the containers... it does it transparently for the windows user... and it works perfectly well if, as I said, you don't require that your databases survive longer than the container...

Well,...let's get to the point,... the point is that many times, to avoid issues and simplify, we need a full Linux system and, if our server is based on Windows, the only way of having it is through a virtual machine. At least till WSL2 in Windows is released, but that will be another story and sure it'll take a bit of time to become robust enough.

In this article, I'll tell you, step by step, how to install an environment where you'll be able to work, if you need it, with Docker containers on an Ubuntu system in your Windows server. Let's go...

Atelier needs Java 1.8 to run, but manage diferent versions of Java can be tricky in OSX

Hi Developers!

As you know InterSystems IRIS Interoperability solutions contain different elements of the solution, such as: production, business rule, business process, data transformation, record mapper. And sometimes we can create and modify these elements with UI tools. And of course we need a handy and robust way to source-control the changes made with UI tools.

For a long time this was a manual (export class, element, global, etc) or cumbersome settings procedure, so the saved time with source-control UI automation was competing with lost time to setup and maintain the settings.

Now the problem doesn't exist any more. With two approaches: package first development and usage of IPM package git-source-control by @Timothy Leavitt
.

The details are below!

There are many projects which work on InterSystems products, and they are not always written only in ObjectScript. I think some of you working with different programming languages and already have some experience with other editors, and hope you already have a favourite online editor.

My current choice is VSCode, whereas you may already know I have added an extension to support ObjectScript.

For some years I missed being able to offer, to everybody interested in ObjectScript, a tutorial more or less complete, to start with ObjectScript. Something that could help more and make things easier to those new developers that come to our technology... something intermediate, halfway between the common "Hello World!", that doesn't really get you further, and the "Advanced Training", that is unaffordable because of lack of time,etc.

If there were something truly helpful not only as an introduction to the ecosystem, but as a starting point, as a boost, to really start to walk into ObjectScript and move forward by yourself... wouldn't that be awesome?

Have you ever been editing files in VS Code, but needed to check a global value or run a few ObjectScript commands? Now you can, with no setup required! If you have vscode-objectscript extension version 2.10.0 or later and are connected to InterSystems IRIS 2023.2 or later, you can now open a terminal connection to your server, regardless of where it's located.

There are three ways to open this new terminal:

ˮ This is one of my articles which was never published in English. Let's fix it!

Not so while ago GitHub introduced, ability to very quickly run VSCode in the browser for any repository hosted there. Press the . key on any repository or pull request, or swap .com with .dev in the URL, to go directly to a VS Code environment in your browser.

This VSCode is a light version of the Desktop version but works entirely in Browser. And due to this, it has a limitation for extensions which was allowed to work this way. And let me introduce the new version 1.2.1 of VSCode-ObjectScript extension which now supports running in Browser mode.

Hi Community,

In the past, technical documentation of the source code and software products was generated in chm, pdf files and documentation generators of the programming languages themselves. This old approach had the following limitations:
1. Outdated documentation;
2. Non-interactive and difficult to consult documentation;
3. Layout unresponsive, unfriendly and not adherent to HTML;
4. Inability to customize the layout of the documentation;
5. Inability to have HTML 5 documentation online and offline.
6. Lack of Markdown support.