#Open Exchange

Hi Developers

As you know it's very easy to publish a package to the Developers Community registry.

But how to test it before publishing? How to be sure that everything you introduced into module.xml is installed properly?

See the step-by-step instruction below!

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Hi developers!

Suppose you have a Github repository with ObjectScript classes but without a Docker environment.

Recently I published a repository with a set of files that form a universal Docker and VSCode environment to let you either import and run your repository in InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on Docker or turn your repository into Docker and VSCode environment for InterSystems IRIS Community Edition.

So in one sentence:

Unpack these files in your folder and you have the Docker and VSCode environment for your InterSystems IRIS ObjectScript application!

See the details below.

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!

Dasha.AI is a platform that allows you to create and manage voice interfaces for your applications. One of Dasha’s distinctive features is that most users believe they are talking to a human, not a robot.

Voice is the most natural way for people to interact. Dasha allows to use voice interface to interact with your application as naturally as communication between people.

In an earlier article (hope, you’ve read it), we took a look at the CircleCI deployment system, which integrates perfectly with GitHub. Why then would we want to look any further? Well, GitHub has its own CI/CD platform called GitHub Actions, which is worth exploring. With GitHub Actions, you don’t need to rely on some external, albeit cool, service.

In this article we’re going to try using GitHub Actions to deploy the server part of InterSystems Package Manager, ZPM-registry, on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Hi Developers!

Recently we released the updated version 0.1.3 of ObjectScript Package Manager (ZPM) which comes with the support of simplified ObjectScript sources folder structure.

What 'simplified' does mean?

Before 0.1.3 ZPM expected the following structure:

/src

---/cls  - for ObjectScript classes

---/cls/package_name/class_name.cls

---/cls/package_name/class_name2.cls

---/mac - or Mac ObjectScript routines

---/mac/package_name/mac_routine.mac

---/mac/package_name/mac_routine2.mac

---/inc - for ObjectScript macro include files.

---/inc/package_name/include_file.inc

Hi Developers!

Recently we published on Docker Hub images for InterSystems IRIS Community Edition and InterSystems IRIS Community for Health containers.

What is that?

There is a repository that publishes it, and in fact, it is the same container IRIS Community Edition containers you have on official InterSystems listing which have the pre-loaded ObjectScript Package Manager (ZPM) client.

So if you run this container with IRIS CE or IRIC CE for Health you can immediately start using ZPM and install packages from Community Registry or any others.

What does this mean for you?

It means, that anyone can deploy any of your InterSystems ObjectScript application in 3 commands:

• run IRIS container;
• open terminal;
• install your application as ZPM package.

It is safe, fast and cross-platform.

It's really handy if you want to test a new interesting ZPM package and not harm any of your systems.

Suppose, you have docker-desktop installed. You can run the image, which wiil pull the latest container if you don't have it locally:

Last time we launched an IRIS application in the Google Cloud using its GKE service.

And, although creating a cluster manually (or through gcloud) is easy, the modern Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach advises that the description of the Kubernetes cluster should be stored in the repository as code as well. How to write this code is determined by the tool that’s used for IaC.

In the case of Google Cloud, there are several options, among them Deployment Manager and Terraform. Opinions are divided as to which is better: if you want to learn more, read this Reddit thread Opinions on Terraform vs. Deployment Manager? and the Medium article Comparing GCP Deployment Manager and Terraform.

Hi Developers!

Suppose you published your application on Open Exchange with version 1.00. And then you've added a new outstanding feature and you make a new release.

You can also make a new release of your application on Open Exchange.

Why make releases on Open Exchange?

This the way for you to highlight the new features of your application. When you publish a new release the following happens:

Release notes appear on the News page of Open Exchange

The version of your app changes

Version History tab is updated

Hi Developers!

This post describes how you could publish your InterSystems application on Open Exchange.

What is the InterSystems application?

It could be anything, which is built with InterSystems data platforms or to help work with InterSystems data platforms: InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems IRIS for Health, InterSystems HealthShare, InterSystems Ensemble and InterSystems Caché. This could be tools, frameworks, adapters, examples and business solutions.

Why publish on Open Exchange?

InterSystems Open Exchange is an "App Central" for the solutions in InterSystems. It's the first place where the developer goes to look for tools, frameworks, and examples on InterSystems IRIS. And Open Exchange brings the added traffic to your solution which could be converted into leads.

We are having a set of business development tools for published Open Exchange applications. This definitely makes your InterSystems application more noticed.

Submitting an application

Suppose you have a library with open source published on Github which you want to publish on Open Exchange. For the purpose of a demo, I'll fork this remarkable project of @Peter Steiwer ObjectScript-Math which I forked and renamed to object script-super-math.

Have you ever needed a math function but could not find what you needed and ended up writing your own? Look no further! ObjectScript-Math is here to solve all your math related function needs.

ObjectScript-Math is an Open Source library for ObjectScript Math functions. It is now available on Open Exchange. This library contains a mix of new functions that are not currently available and functions that are available. The existing functions will be wrapped for use from ObjectScript-Math so that all Math functions can have a central location.

This library will continue to grow, so give it a try and give your feedback!

Don't see what you are looking for? Please feel free to submit requests for additional functions or contribute code yourself!

Last time we deployed a simple IRIS application to the Google Cloud. Now we’re going to deploy the same project to Amazon Web Services using its Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

We assume you’ve already forked the IRIS project to your own private repository. It’s called <username>/my-objectscript-rest-docker-template in this article. <root_repo_dir> is its root directory.

Before getting started, install the AWS command-line interface and, for Kubernetes cluster creation, eksctl, a simple CLI utility. For AWS you can try to use aws2, but you’ll need to set aws2 usage in kube config file as described here.

DeepSeeButtons is available on Open Exchange! This tool will generate a diagnostic report of your DeepSee environment.