#Development Environment

Hope most of you already familiar with project CachéQuality from @Daniel.Tamajon. For those who don’t know about it, it is a static syntax analyzer for your code written for InterSystems products. It may help you to find and solve many different types of issues in your code, and even possible bugs before clients will find it in production. So, with help of CachéQuality you will be able to deliver a better product. You can find the complete list of rules used to check ObjectScript code here.

It was already available in Studio. And now it is also available in VSCode.

We have Webterminal around for quite a while, but it was limited, not all features worked there. There was no shell support or the latest feature as embedded Python support. There are some issues with tools that require programmer mode. Basic Authorization, not as handy as simple login page, where you could have options to add own login page, in case if you would wish to change the way how to login to the application, such as using SSO.

With the original iris terminal, wrapped into a web form, using most used in the web world xterm.js, used in tools like VSCode as well, with some magic from Python, which helped with interprocess tty. We can get the the terminal in the web, in the full capacity.

The VS Code extension development team is looking for beta testers to provide feedback on a proposed overhaul of the client-side editing workflow. The full list of changes can be found in the GitHub pull request description. Here are the highlights:

• Support the use of client-side editing in any non-isfs workspace folder, not just folders in your local file system. For example, with VS Code Remote Development.
• Create an index of all Classes, MAC and INT routines, and Include files inside non-isfs workspace folders.

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: 

Greetings, InterSystems community!

I am pleased to announce that the web terminal project, Caché WebTerminal version 4 gets its release! After long period of enhancing this web application from 2013, it came to the version 4, which features major stability and security improvements, intelligent autocomplete and syntax highlighting, convenient SQL mode and a lot of other useful features.

The goal of this article is to spread the knowledge about this project over the InterSystems community.

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?

We are happy to present the bonuses page for the applications submitted to the InterSystems Developer Tools Contest 2025!

See the results below.

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?

Introduction

The InterSystems IRIS Data Platform has long been known for its performance, interoperability, and flexibility across programming languages. For years, developers could use IRIS with Python, Java, JavaScript, and .NET — but Go (or Golang) developers were left waiting.

That wait is finally over.

The new go-irisnative driver brings GoLang support to InterSystems IRIS, implementing the standard database/sql API. This means Go developers can now use familiar database tooling, connection pooling, and query interfaces to build applications powered by IRIS.

Why GoLang Support Matters

GoLang is a language designed for simplicity, concurrency, and performance — ideal for cloud-native and microservices-based architectures. It powers some of the world’s most scalable systems, including Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform.

Bringing IRIS into the Go ecosystem enables:

• Lightweight, high-performance services using IRIS as the backend.
• Native concurrency for parallel query execution or background processing.
• Seamless integration with containerized and distributed systems.
• Idiomatic database access through Go’s database/sql interface.

This integration makes IRIS a perfect fit for modern, cloud-ready Go applications.

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.

So why did we need to give people a “server in the cloud”? Atelier is the new IDE for InterSystems products. It is Eclipse based and implemented in Java so it is cross platform. The communication between the Atelier client and the server is REST based over http.

As the title says, when I use the "Go To Definition (F12)" option, it opens the definition in read only mode. Is there some way to either directly make the go to option editable or can i turn the read only version into an editable version? I end up needing to open the file directly and then manually going to the method definition myself.

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 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!

 I'm trying to set up VS Code for ObjectScript using the instructions found here I've got both Cache 2018.1.2.309.0 and IRIS 2020.1.0.215.0. When I try to connect to either one of them the connection fails, and I get a notification in the bottom right corner that says "Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0". I've checked the JSON settings file that VS Code uses, and they're fine and formatted properly. All of the settings I've entered are correct. I suspect that there's a response coming back from the server that VS Code is expecting to be JSON, but isn't.

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.

Atelier has reached a threshold of feature completeness. Atelier 1.3 which is currently in flight will mainly focus on supporting the latest release of Eclipse Photon. After release, Atelier and Studio will continue to receive critical software corrections.

Hi Community,

I'm building a browser only code editor for IRIS. Here is a video demonstration. It's still very much "work in progress", more updates to come. I will also add it to ZPM soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am6QAvrPPPg

I'm pleased to announce version 2.6.0 of the VS Code ObjectScript extension, containing a number of enhancements that make a developer's life easier. Some highlights are described below. As always, find the full list of modifications in the CHANGELOG, including many bug and vulnerability fixes.

Switch namespaces quickly

Thanks to @Olli Tanskanen at partner company JediSoft Oy for this enhancement! You can now switch namespaces from the Server Actions menu (when using client-side folders only).

Fast, asynchronous server-side search

This one requires InterSystems IRIS 2023.

Hi all, it's finally time for the next release of VSCode ObjectScript extension. So what's new in this release.

• Debugging support, for classes, routines and attach to a running process

• Files in Server Explorer now can be edited

• Added more details about connection errors

• Improvements in Server Explorer build tree

• Fixed memory leak when exporting large amount of files
• Server view can be opened in explorer as virtual file system with schema `isfs://`
• Option to suppress popup information message about successful compile, ("objectscript.suppressCompileMessages": true)
• Export, addCategory setting have more flexibility in naming category for exported items
• Formatting for commands and functions, as Word, UPPER or lower
• Some improvements in syntax highlighting
• Some other small fixes

I'm pleased to announce the latest version of the renewed for ObjectScript, which is now available with a lot of new features.

This new extension is a fork of previously developed extension in different repository originally started by @Oleg.Dmitrovich9110.

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 devs!

How one can understand the classnames of request and response messages of a given operation?

E.g. when I build the data transformation, how do I know which message will come to the operation?

Hi Developers!

We are happy to present the bonuses page for the applications submitted to the DevTools Contest 2024!

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.

Below is a list of the major improvements planned for 1.1, which we are expecting to demo at the Global Summit.

1.

I am currently trying to better my development process by using Visual Studio Code because I'm more familiar and comfortable with it than Studio.

I've followed the guide here, but I'm still having issues. I initially didn't have the Web Socket protocol allowed on my Web Gateway server, but I enabled that and restarted the server with no luck.

Am I just on too old of a version? Is there any way I'd be able to use Visual Studio Code and be able to debug with what I currently have? I wish I could upgrade to IRIS, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

Hi all, I have released the latest version of VSCode extension for ObjectScript already a month ago, and finally a time for the info about this new release.

So, what's new in the release:

What's new in this version

• added export setting "objectscript.export.addCategory" if enabled uses the previous behaviour, adds category folder to export folder, disabled by default
• added Server actions menu, by clicking on server info from status bar. Open Management portal, Class Reference and toggle connection.
• Class Suggestion in ##class, Extends, As, CompileAfter, DependsOn, PropertyClass
• $SYSTEM suggestion by Classes from %SYSTEM
• Import and compile folder or file by context menu in File Explorer
• Server Explorer, now possible to open any other namespace
• Macros suggestion

For details how it works now, look further.

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?
• Do you have a development server to which you commit and test features there, or do you rather run a local copy of caché and implement features locally first, then push to the

Hello community!

Heretofore is announced a new project which aims at providing a usable library for both running unit tests and collecting code coverage information at the same time:

https://github.com/litesolutions/cache-utcov

I shamelessly admit that this is my first project written in ObjectScript; the only source file right now barely loads a %Studio.Project instance on a given namespace and fails ungracefully on failure (it HALTs; meh); and even on success it will not even list the items correctly.

InterSystems is delighted to announce the support of Docker container technology as a platform from the moment 2016.1 will be released.

Docker is a disruptive system technology that has many benefits and offers many advantages for those investing in infrastructure-as-code or immutable-infrastructure provisioning & deployment scenarios.
Like any new technology that appears, there is a learning curve, and many considerations need to occur when using it. However, Docker container technology has already proven to be successful by a huge follow-up with many companies already using it in production.

We at George James Software are pleased to announce that our acclaimed code debugger and editor Serenji is now available as a Visual Studio Code extension.

As well as supporting the latest InterSystems IRIS platform Serenji also works with earlier platforms, including versions lacking the server-side Atelier API support required by other VS Code extensions.

Serenji connects you directly to the code in your namespaces, resulting in an experience more familiar to existing Studio users. No need to export and import classes and routines.

We believe Serenji is the first extension to bring VS Code's powerful debugging features to ObjectScript developers.