#Development Environment

Hi Everyone, 

As I'm sure most of you will be aware, we have an excellent resource available to developers in the Open Exchange, which is a place for Community Members to share open source resources, templates, tools and demos built with or for InterSystems technologies. This has been a massive success, with >1100 projects shared!

However, the growing size of the Open Exchange inevitably leads to some excellent resources being buried and lost in the sea of resources.

Over the past several years, the InterSystems Developer Community has accumulated more than 1,000 open-source projects. Many of them serve as examples and learning materials — but a significant number have become useful tools, libraries, integrations, and real-world components used in production.

Some of these projects are mine, and like many community developers, I’ve seen the same recurring problem:

• It’s easy to create an open-source project.
• It’s hard to maintain, support, and develop it sustainably — especially without funding.

Writing code is one thing.
Supporting it for years, keeping up with new IRIS versions, building CI pipelines, writing documentation, fixing issues, reviewing PRs — all of this demands both time and motivation, and the biggest motivator is often financial support.

This is not a new challenge.
The global open-source world has faced this for decades and has developed various models to support OSS ecosystems.

I believe it’s time for the InterSystems community to start a discussion about adopting a similar model.

Hi devs!

What is the best way to return JSON in IRIS for a GET request in a REST app?

This is how I do it now:

ClassMethodAs%Stream.Object

The query is used vs the following persistent class:

%PersistentAs

What I don't like:

1. "Unnecessary" "manual" writes of "[]":

2. Code block repeat for the first segment to excuse "," :

3. I should introduce an "artificial" PersonId to make the response include record ID's (thanks to @Robert Cemper):

%Integer

Your ideas?

Hi VSCode users!

Just want to check with you, is this settings.json file ideal enough if I:

1. Want VSCode to connect to IRIS in docker?

2. Want to use VSCode SQL Tool?

The connection settings file:

{
    "files.associations": {
    
        "Dockerfile*": "dockerfile",
        "iris.script": "objectscript"
      },
    "objectscript.conn" :{
      "ns": "IRISAPP",
      "username":"_SYSTEM",
      "password": "SYS",
      "docker-compose": {
        "service": "iris",
        "internalPort": 52773
      }
    },
    "sqltools.connections": [
      {
        "namespace": "IRISAPP",
        "connectionMethod": "Server and Port",
        "showSystem": false,
        "previewLimit": 50,
        "server": "localhost",
        "port": 32770,
        "askForPassword": false,
        "driver": "InterSystems IRIS",
        "name": "objectscript-docker",
        "username": "_SYSTEM",
        "password": "SYS"
      }
    ]

}

In the discussions at https://community.intersystems.com/post/intersystems-studio-deprecated-starting-20232 one notable topic has been that some Studio users make regular use of its facilities for exporting multiple code artifacts (e.g. classes and routines) into a single XML file on the workstation, then exporting that file into a different server namespace.

Unless / until equivalent features are added to the VS Code ObjectScript extension, can these people fill the gap by using the System Explorer section of Management Portal?

A question for anyone using InterSystems technology:

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced either trying to hire developers that know ObjectScript, or trying to train developers on ObjectScript?

• Are developers generally willing or resistant to the idea of learning ObjectScript?   Why?
• For developers trying to learn ObjectScript - what was that process like?   What were the main challenges there?
  • In-person learning?  
  • Online class? 
  • Documentation?  
  • What were your impressions?
• How did it compare to other languages?
• What would have made it easier to learn?

So, the next year will bring us a new way of installing IRIS. Always keep in mind that you have to bring your own web server. No matter how many instances of IRIS you have on your local machine. Or if you work in Docker, always keep in mind a bit more complicated configuration.

And I now want to understand the costs of this decision for end-developers like most of here.

Let's have a look, at what we got out of the box in Web Applications, obviously do not forget about System Management Portal.

Good morning, evening, night,... 

A small reflection/question for today... it's true that new IRIS for Health (I4H) releases are more and more powerful each time regarding FHIR capabilities. Nowadays it allows us to consume FHIR resources with extrem easiness, we can connect with end-points in external FHIR servers very easily and make I4H act as passthrough or consume their resources... or, even more, we can define, configure and run a FHIR repository in, literally, less than 5 minutes.

Hi folks!

We have a bunch of templates on OEX that provide a handy foundation for building a particular application with IRIS.  And the basic principle of each and every template is that we take vanilla IRIS images, load code, and files into the image using Dockerfile, and create a new docker image as a solution. And then we develop running this image and rebuilding it when returning to development.

Some developers ask me why we need to build the docker image to work with the code. Indeed, if at the end of the day I need to develop a ZPM package and not a docker image why don't run the vanilla image and load the code and everything in it? 

The problem I have with the building image approach is that often I can wait a lot to build an image and it fails on some Objectscript problem in the source that I cannot fix as the image is not building. and 

Any thoughts? How do you develop with docker?

The use of Source Code Control systems in development is important. And there are a few systems known in the world, like GIT, SVN (Subversion), Perforce, Mercurial. Where the most popular nowadays is the git. Using it is very useful in many cases, but mostly it depends on the code as text, which can be compared between commits, branches, or versions of releases and so on.

Hi,
It can now be programmed with different development enviroments in Cache / Iris.
The question arises which is the primary IDE Intersystems prefers when it comes to new features.
We are working in a small team, should we use Atelier or VSCode in addition to Studio? 

What do you use, and why?

Happy new year! I’m Raj Singh, InterSystems’ product manager for Developer Experience and  I’d love your feedback on how you use IDEs today and your thoughts for the future.

We understand you depend on a solid, intuitive and flexible IDE from InterSystems - whether you are an ObjectScript expert or new to it; whether ObjectScript is at the core of your applications, or you develop more in Java, Python, C# or Node.js.

Hi! We have received a request to create a new rule on CachéQuality to identify when a developer uses double quotes (" ") within any SQL statement.

We have been asked many times about SQL validation rules, and we would like to open a debate to allow everyone discuss what would you like to be checked on a SQL statement.

Current examples are for basic situations:

• Using SQL.Statement class:

Set stmt = ##CLASS(%SQL.Statement).

Is anyone in the fine community of developers who work with ISC technologies looking at Microsoft's Visual Studio Code offering?

One of Bill McCormick's recent posts about Atelier referred to Visual Studio being considered the best IDE. Granted, Code is far less of a tool than VS, and probably always will be. But it claims to be open source and cross-platform, i.e. Linux and OS X as well as Windows.

I'm not 100% sure my post belongs in the Atelier group, but didn't see any other group that would be a better home.  Might we benefit from a "Tools" group?

I understand this is a rather broad topic (and at times involves religious sentiments) yet I would like to look at it from the Caché perspective:

• Do you use an issue tracking / collaboration system? If so which one. Any you would recommend or immediately dismiss based on personal experience?
• How do you keep track of large code bases? Thousdands of folders named backup1, backups2, ..., SVN, git?