Hi developers!

Observing the avalanche of AI-driven and vibe-coding developer tools that have been appearing lately almost every month with more and more exciting dev features, I was puzzled whether it is possible to leverage it with InterSystems IRIS. At least to build a frontend. And the answer - yes! At least with the approach I followed.

Here is my recipe to prompt the UI vs InterSystems IRIS Backend:

1. Have the REST API on the IRIS side, which reflects some Open API (swagger) spec.
2. Generate the UI with any vibe-coding tool (e.g., Lovable) and point the UI to the REST API endpoint.
3. Profit!

Here is the result of my own exercise - a 100% prompted UI vs IRIS REST API that allows to list, create, update delete entries of a persistent class (Open Exchange, frontend source, video):

What is the recipe in detail?

In this article I'll show you how to set up in your laptop, very quickly, a cluster of IRIS nodes in sharding. It's not the goal of this article neither to talk about sharding in detail nor define a deployment of a production ready architecture, but to show how to set up quickly, in your own machine, a cluster of IRIS instances configured as shard nodes, with which you'll able to play and test this functionality. If you're insterested in knowing more about sharding in IRIS, take a look at the documentation clicking here.

First and foremost, I want to remark that IRIS sharding will allow us 2 things:

• Define, load and query shard tables, which data will be distributed transparently between the cluster's nodes
• Define federated tables, which offer a global and composed view of data belonging to different tables that will be physically stored in different distributed nodes

So, as I said, we let for other article playing with shard or federated tables, and just focus now in the previous step, that is, setting up the cluster of shard nodes.

Hi fellow developers in InterSystems IRIS!

I'm often being asked, especially related to technical bonuses we encourage for every Open Exchange contest why do we constantly give bonuses for Docker, IPM and ObjectScript Quality pass.

In fact, this is very easy to answer.

Hi everyone,

In this article, I’m excited to introduce CodeInspector, a tool designed to simplify code validation by applying custom rules tailored to your development requirements. Whether you're managing a large codebase or working in an agile environment, CodeInspector helps ensure code quality by offering flexibility and adaptability to specific project needs.

There are many applications for working with HL7 V2 messages, but the tools for working with XML in IRIS Management Portal and Cache Studio are limited.

Hi folks!

Often, when we develop commercial solutions, there is a necessity to deploy solutions without source code, e.g., in order to preserve the IP.

One of the ways how this can be achieved is to use InterSystems Package Manager.

Here I asked Midjourney to paint an intellectual property of software:

How this can be achieved with IPM?

In fact, this is very simple; just add the Deploy="true" clause in the Resource element in your module.xml manifest. Documentation.

I decided to provide the simplest possible example to illustrate how it works and also to give you a development environment template to let start building and deploying your own modules without source code. He we go!

SQLTools is a Visual Studio Code (VS Code) Extension with over 3.5 million downloads that provides connections to many of the most used databases, including InterSystems IRIS, using drivers.

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.

When you use VS Code to edit source code, the settings model allows you to specify folder-specific values for some settings by using a settings.json file located in a .vscode sub-folder of the workspace root folder. A value set here takes precedence over one from your personal settings when you are working within that workspace root folder.

While starting the development with IRIS we have a distribution kit or in case of Docker we are pulling the docker image and then often we need to initialize it and setup the development environment. We might need to create databases, namespaces, turn on/off some services, create resources. We often need to import code and data into IRIS instance and run some custom code to init the solution.

And there plenty of templates on Open Exchange where we suggest how to init REST, Interoperability, Analytics, Fullstack and many other templates with ObjectScript. What if we want to use only Python to setup the development environment for Embedded Python project with IRIS?

So, the recent release of Embedded Python template is the pure python boilerplate that could be a starting point for developers that build python projects with no need to use and learn ObjectScript. This article expresses how this template could be used to initialize IRIS. Here we go!

If you want to know more about a new project or generate a new way to see your project, the better way is using mindmaps or markdown documentation. The IRIS Connections allows to you generate the mindmap for your classes and get your classes documentation in a markdown file.

It has been asked a few times recently, how one can make Laravel Framework work with InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. It's been a while since this post about Laravel and InterSystems Caché was published. To bring it up to date, the article gives a brief instruction set on how to setup and configure a Laravel project for use with InterSystems IRIS through ODBC.

What is Laravel?

As you have probably noticed, online product documentation has advanced tremendously in the last few years. Among numerous improvements under the hood, documentation has become easier to read and navigate. And we now have a powerful search engine that gets you to what you need more accurately than we could ever do with the old system of shipping documentation in the product. While most of you have probably had nothing but positive impacts on your workflows, it has come to my attention that some of you may be having a slight problem accessing custom class documentation.

Hi! As a developer who was forced to move from Mac to Windows (temporary) I found some things a bit confusing. In this article I would like to talk about some tweaks I made to make my experience smoother. I think it can help not only Mac users who need to use Windows environment (for ex. in VMs), but also can help some Windows users to make some things more convenient. Of course, all the points are subjective, the best setup is one that works for you.

All the tweaks are related to Windows 10 as I don’t have an access to Windows 11 at the moment.