Full-Stack JavaScript development allows you to create state-of-the-art applications with Caché. With any (web) app you build nowadays, one has to make a lot of architectural decisions and you want to make the right ones. With the Node.js connector available for Caché, you can create a very powerful server side application server, allowing you to use the latest JavaScript technology and frameworks client- and server-side.
With all these new technologies, the most important is to integrate them in the most efficient way and to create a very productive development experience. This article willl get you started step-by-step with Node.js technology.
Some time ago I got a WRC case transferred where a customer asks for the availability of a raw DEFLATE compression/decompression function built-in Caché.
When we talk about DEFLATE we need to talk about Zlib as well, since Zlib is the de-facto standard free compression/decompression library developed in the mid-90s.
Zlib works on particular DEFLATE compression/decompression algorithm and the idea of encapsulation within a wrapper (gzip, zlib, etc.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib
One of the most important features during application development is the ability to debug your code easily. Because of the asynchrnous nature, a standard Node.js application server works single-threaded by default. When you are developing applications using an IDE like Visual Studio Code, you can very easily debug your Node.js process:
This is the second part of my long post about package managers in operating systems and language distributions. Now, hopefully, we have managed to convince you that convenient package manager and rich 3rd party code repository is one key factor in establishing of a vibrant and fast growing ecosystem. (Another possible reason for ecosystem success is the consistent language design, but it will be topic for another day.)
I wrote a step by step tutorial in the qewd-howtos repository how you can write state of the art multi-page web apps with Node.js using a QEWD-Up WebSocket/REST api back-end integrated with a mainstream web framework like NuxtJS & Vue.js.
Here I’ll walk you through the process of creating a simple Node/Express API and connect it to a InterSystems IRIS instance.
I won't go into much detail about how to work with any of the technologies I will mention in this tutorial but I will leave links, in case you want to learn more.
The objective here is to give you a practical guide on how to set up and connect a node.js back-end API to IRIS.
Before we get our hands dirty, make sure you have Node.js running on your machine. So I'll check:
It will demonstrate the wide range that is openend by making use of the power embedded in Node.js and its adapter to Caché, Ensemble, Health,..* Node / JavaScript have wide reputation to work as a WebSocket client. By using the Caché adapter it becomes easy to control it and to consume the results as a Client for WebSocket Servers and to collect the replies in Caché, Ensemble, ..
I used node-v6.16.0-x64.msi and cache610.node as cache.node
As a result of Evgeny's recent questions regarding the use of QEWD.js with IRIS in another post, I thought it would be a good idea to create a separate post focusing specifically on how to use QEWD.js to create REST APIs for IRIS.
QEWD.js is, of course, a Node.js framework, and all the REST API code can be written entirely in JavaScript.
There's a new and exciting enhancement to QEWD that has just been released - it's an additional layer of abstraction known as QEWD-Up. QEWD-Up hides away all the mechanics of QEWD itself, allowing you to focus on just your REST APIs and the code that implements them.
Additionally, and importantly, QEWD-Up simplifies the maintenance of your REST APIs, allowing you (and others) to quickly and easily understand their life-cycle and implementation.
If your looking to develop a Node.JS to Caché library then you might want to consider using a pure TCP connection with a custom message transport protocol. This bypasses the native Caché connector libraries that can get stale with a new release.
Node.JS is very good at non blocking code development, so building a performant solution isn't that complex.
Recently I reread this article by @Bernd Mueller. It's about calling DELFATE function from zlib library. In this article I'll demonstrate several different approaches to callout libraries, we'll build the same functionality (compress function) in several different languages and compare them.
I've mentioned the QEWD project in this group before: it's a Node.js-based platform for web, Native and REST applications which tightly integrates with Cache. It uses a somewhat different philosophy to the use of Node.js than the norm, and I've now published an article that explains this approach and the unique benefits that arise as a result.
It turns out that, integrated via QEWD, Cache is an ideal bed-fellow for Node.js. QEWD makes the integration of Cache and Node.js exceptionally fast, simple and intuitive to use, but also extremely powerful.
This is the second post on the resources for Developers. This part is about Open Exchange
Using Open Exchange to Learn InterSystems
InterSystems Open Exchange is a applications gallery of tools, connectors, and libraries which InterSystems Developers submit to share the experience, approaches and do business. All the applications are either built with InterSystems data platforms or are intended to use for development with InterSystems data platforms.
If you are a beginner developer you can take a look at applications in Technology Example category. All the applications in this category come with open source code repositories, so you are able to run the samples and examples in a docker container with IRIS on your laptop or in the cloud IRIS sandbox. Examples:
The concept of low code development is getting more and more important across all industries. Everybody who is starting to get into low code programming, will inevitably come across Node-RED. InterSystems IRIS is renowned for its interoperability and so should be accessible via Node-RED.
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ˮ This is one of my articles which was never published in English. Let's fix it!
Beginning - 
Open Exchange app