Ensemble

Preface: our small, but very ambitious company called “Black Mushroom Studio” came up with an idea for an e-commerce project and a mobile app that would let users pay for certain goods/services via a payment aggregator.

What we had initially: an Android app skeleton that, of course, liked communicating via HTTP and JSON, and a payment system with an API – web services with SOAP content.

Goal: make it all work together.

Does anyone NOT use a debugger? I can't remember the last time I did. It's not because I don't dislike them, I just don't need to use them. The main reason for this is because I have a certain development methodology that either produces less bugs, catches them at a unit test level, or makes tracking them down much easier.

Here are my tips...

1. Write your own COS cheat-sheet.

++ Update: August 1, 2018

The use of the InterSystems Virtual IP (VIP) address built-in to Caché database mirroring has certain limitations. In particular, it can only be used when mirror members reside the same network subnet. When multiple data centers are used, network subnets are not often “stretched” beyond the physical data center due to added network complexity (more detailed discussion here). For similar reasons, Virtual IP is often not usable when the database is hosted in the cloud.

Network traffic management appliances such as load balancers (physical or virtual) can be used to achieve the same level of transparency, presenting a single address to the client applications or devices. The network traffic manager automatically redirects clients to the current mirror primary’s real IP address. The automation is intended to meet the needs of both HA failover and DR promotion following a disaster. 

This short article was motivated by a problem of one of my customers. They use Ensemble to integrate many systems, some of them use just plain files.

So they naturally selected File Outbound Adapter to write into target file. Things were running smoothly for years, until recently, when the volume of data being written to the file reached large size of tens of megabytes. The operation took around half an hour to complete, causing timing problems where subsequent operations within the process had to wait, and third party system was not happy to wait so long.

A beginners guide to develop Ensemble RESTful web services.

Background

Before you start reading this short introduction please go through the on-line documentation of Ensemble with special attention to chapter “Creating REST services and clients with Ensemble”.

The approach in the documentation is undisputable the fastest and easiest way to create RESTful services. As a beginner I went through the documentation and I had several questions. This short article is listing those questions plus my humble answers.

The message viewer can resend messages but it is not suitable for resending a large number of messages (>100).  For that, you should use Cache Object Script code such as the following:

"Telegram" is a well-known instant messenger, which provides an API for creating bots. The features of this API allow you to create bots with a wide range of functionality including receiving payments. 
With the help of the telegram bot, I solved a simple task - sending Alerts from Ensemble to Telegram.

Advantages: Alerts come to the mobile phone, a notification appears, so there is no need to install any additional applications (in contrast to the solution https://community.intersystems.com/post/sending-alerts-mobile-phone-using-pushover- httpoutboundadapter).

The bot can be extended by adding new commands, for example, for managing the Production or for solving other tasks in Iris, Ensemble or Cache.

Hi Community,

This post is to introduce one of my first project in COS, I created when started to learn the language and until today I'm keeping improve it.

The CosFaker(here on Github) is a pure COS library for generating fake data.

cosFaker vs Populate Utils

So why use cosFaker if caché has the populate data utility?

WebSockets as a communication technology wins increasing importance.
In the SAMPLES namespace, you find a nice example for running a WebSocket Server.
There is also a useful example for a Browser Client. JavaScript does most of the work. 

My point is:
How to consume the output of a WebSocket Server in your application?

When running the built in Ensemble Purge task (Ens.Util.Tasks.Purge) there are three parameters DaysToKeep, BodiesToo, and KeepIntegrity.  This article focuses on the KeepIntegrity boolean parameter, but more information about running this task can be found here:

http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=...

KeepIntegrity determines which Ensemble Messages are marked for deletion within the time specified by DaysToKeep. 

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.

This example is extracted from a long-running installation. The purpose is to have a simple monitoring of several servers at a rather primitive level. Just slightly more intelligent than a raw PING. But still easy to integrate. It avoids the overkill of information you are often confronted with while you are just interested in the number of active process or similar basic figures.

The code is available for you on Open Exchange too.

I am happy to announce the immediate availability of  Caché and Ensemble 2016.1.

The highlights of 2016.1 are

• Significant improvements in JSON support
• Continued advances in SQL performance
• Database scalability improvements
• New REST services for DeepSee

These and other new features are summarized in this video introduction to 2016.1

For complete technical details of what’s changed in 2016.1, review the Caché release notes and the Ensemble release notes.