Article
· Dec 3, 2021 1m read
VSCode-ObjectScript on GitHub

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.

github dev

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.

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Article
· Aug 20, 2021 6m read
GitHub Codespaces with IRIS

Some time ago GitHub, has announced the new feature, GitHub Codespaces. It gives an ability to run VSCode in the browser, with almost the same power as it would run locally on your machine, but also with a power of clouds, so, you are able to choose the machine type with up to 32 CPU cores and 64 GB of RAM.

Looks impressive, is not it? But how it could help us, to work with projects driven by InterSystems IRIS? Let's have a look, how to configure it for us.

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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:

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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...

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Are you all ready for something you wish you knew ages ago (or, in my case, a DECADE ago)? Open up a portal in your favorite instance and go to:

System Administration->Configuration->Additional Settings->Startup

Scroll down to "Terminal Prompt" and click 'Edit'. This allows you to edit what you see on your terminal prompt. You can change that to my current setting: 8,3,2

What does this do? It adds your instance name for your prompt. So now your prompt can look like:

DEVELOPMENT:USER>

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Article
· Aug 21, 2019 2m read
ToolBox-4-Iris

Hello everyone,
After some work with IRIS we want to share our ToolBox-4-Iris with you.

What is this about?

The ToolBox-4-Iris is an API for IRIS with a collection of handy and useful tools - features that are not available in IRIS, but greatly simplify application development. To save time and effort on the "typical tools" that every developer needs. This includes additional classes, individual methods or even more efficient macros, which are described in the respective packages.

Content

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Adding VSCode into your IRIS container

One of the easiest ways to setup repeatable development environments is to spin up containers for them. I find that when iterating quickly, it was very convenient to host a vscode instance within my development container. Thus, I have created a quick container script to add a browser-based vscode into an IRIS container. This should work for most 2021.1+ containers. My code repository can be found here

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Article
· Oct 11, 2022 2m read
Accessing class documentation in Studio

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.

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Article
· Dec 4, 2015 3m read
Atelier Beta Cloud Infrastructure

A few people wrote to me asking about the infrastructure behind the Atelier Server implementation. Its neat and a worthwhile story to share so I am writing it up here as a post on the community. I want to go in to a little detail on why it was needed and then I will outline in detail how we went about implementing this.

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Article
· May 14, 2020 1m read
IRS Docker micro Durability

Allow limited durability for demo and development IRIS-Docker-micro-Durability During development of a container based demo I found the need to access a fresh docker
an instance of IRIS image (e.g intersystems/iris-community:2020.2.0.199.0) over and over.
To bypass loading my code repeatedly I developed this workaround.

It is a reduced variant of Docker - light weight durability

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I wanted to share a little tidbit which is in the Studio documentation (http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20152/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?...) but many people who have been using the InterSystems Studio for a long time missed the addition of this *very* useful feature, and every time I mention this to an audience I see at least one face light up because of how excited they are to learn about it!

Within Studio, the Output pane (View -> Output) is actually misnamed. It is actually an Input/Output window which can be used to run Caché ObjectScript commands!

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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!

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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?

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Article
· Feb 19, 2016 4m read
Why Atelier? And what about Studio?

I have been meaning to make a post about this topic for a few weeks and the other day an issue came in through the WRC about it so it seems this is a conversation we should be having. I want to begin by taking a few moments to explain "Why Atelier" then we can talk about what this means in the general sense for Studio and Atelier and Caché developers. We have wrestled with what to do with Studio for years. When I moved to Product Management in 2008 this was already a "thing". At the time we could not reach a consensus. Some felt Studio was fine as is.

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One of the many benefits of using Atelier for your ObjectScript development is its integration with a wide range of source control systems. This integration enables you to use modern development workflows which increase collaboration while minimizing the risk inherent to volatile code bases.

Veteran ObjectScript developers can tell you about the workarounds that were needed before they could use source control systems with products like Caché and Ensemble. One of these was to treat the data store itself effectively as a code repository. And so shared development environments became essential for many of our customers to be productive and successful.

For code shops that rely on shared development environments, adopting Atelier might seem too complicated. This article aims to provide a practical example to guide your team towards success with Atelier.

You can find an overview of the problems and solutions in this article here, which is a good place to start. This article assumes that you are familiar with the concepts introduced there.

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Hi Community!

I think everyone keeps the source code of the project in the repository nowadays: Github, GitLab, bitbucket, etc. Same for InterSystems IRIS projects check any on Open Exchange.

What do we do every time when start or continue working with a certain repository with InterSystems Data Platform?

We need a local InterSystems IRIS machine, have the environment for the project set up and the source code imported.

So every developer performs the following:

  1. Check out the code from repo
  2. Install/Run local IRIS installation
  3. Create a new namespace/database for a project
  4. Import the code into this new namespace
  5. Setup all the rest environment
  6. Start/continue coding the project

If you dockerize your repository this steps line could be shortened to this 3 steps:

  1. Check out the code from repo
  2. Run docker-compose build
  3. Start/continue coding the project

Profit - no any hands-on for 3-4-5 steps which could take minutes and bring head ache sometime.

You can dockerize (almost) any your InterSystems repo with a few following steps. Let’s go!

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Article
· Jun 6, 2017 2m read
Atelier 1.1 Roadmap

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.

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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?

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Are you preparing to use VS code for the first time? Just make sure you have enough privileges.

Have you defined your Iris server in your VS Code settings, and still get the following error?

VS Code accesses Iris/HealthConnect using the web application /api/atelier. If you do not have permission (i.e. you are using an LDAP user to connect and the web application is not configured to support LDAP), this is the reason why you couldn't connect.

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Article
· Nov 29, 2021 3m read
Previewing Server Manager 3.0 for VS Code

The InterSystems Server Manager extension for Visual Studio Code lets you define connections to your servers, list their namespaces and edit or view code there. You can also launch Portal for a server.

Server Manager 3.0 improves security by becoming a VS Code Authentication Provider. It is my entry for the November 2021 InterSystems Security Contest. Click here to visit the contest page where you may decide to vote for this entry. Please ignore the clickable "Contestant" label on this article header above, as it relates to a different contest for new DC articles. If you want to support me in that contest, simply "like" this post.

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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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Hello fellow developers!

When developing with ObjectScript Package Manager, one crucial thing is the package version, which we place in the module.xml file. When we add changes to the package and are ready to publish a new version of the package in the registry, we also need to increase the version number. This is clear, but it is annoying, and we can often forget to do that.

This small article will help you to automate such a process.

Probot logo

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Here you have an easy way to write and execute COS code from your unix scripts. This way one does not need to write routines or even open Studio or Atelier. It can be an option for simple and small actions for instance things like installation tasks or compiling.

See sample bash script (compile.sh) to compile classes:

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