The Caché System Management Portal includes a robust web-based SQL query tool, but for some applications it’s more convenient to use a dedicated SQL client installed on a user’s PC.

SQuirreL SQL is a well known open source SQL client built in Java, which uses JDBC to connect to a DBMS. As such, we can configure SQuirreL to connect to Caché using the Caché JDBC driver.

Finding Caché’s JDBC driver JAR

The JAR file containing the Caché JDBC driver is installed automatically by the Caché installer when installing a full Caché instance or when installing client components only.

If you're building solutions on IRIS and want to use Git, that's great! Just use VSCode with a local git repo and push your changes out to the server - it's that easy.

But what if:

• You're collaborating with other developers on a shared, remote development environment and want to avoid concurrent editing of the same file
• You're using editors based in the management portal for BPL, DTL, pivots, dashboards, etc.

Hi Developers!

Often when we develop some library, tool, package, whatever on InterSystems ObjectScript we have a question, how we deploy this package on the target machine?

Also, we often expect that some other libraries already installed, so our package depends on them, and often on some particular version of it.

When you code on javascript, python, etc the role of packages deployment with dependency management takes package manager.

So, I'm pleased to announce that InterSystems ObjectScript Package Manager available!

Intro

For many in today's interoperability landscape, REST reigns supreme. With the overabundance of tools and approaches to REST API development, what tools do you choose and what do you need to plan for before writing any code? This article focuses on design patterns and considerations that allow you to build highly robust, adaptive, and consistent REST APIs. Viable approaches to challenges of CORS support and authentication management will be discussed, along with various tips and tricks and best tools for all stages of REST API development. Learn about the open-source REST APIs available for InterSystems IRIS Data Platform and how they tackle the challenge of ever-increasing API complexity. The article is a write-up for a recent webinar on the same topic.

Ansible helped me solve the problem of quickly deploying Caché and application components for Data Platforms benchmarks. You can use the same tools and methodology for standing up your test labs, training systems, development or other environments. If you deploy applications at customer sites you could automate much of the deployment and ensure that system, Caché and your application are configured to your applications best practice standards.

Released with no formal announcement in IRIS preview release 2019.4 is the /api/monitor service exposing IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. Big news for anyone wanting to use IRIS metrics as part of their monitoring and alerting solution. The API is a component of the new IRIS System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) solution that will be released in an upcoming version of IRIS.

However, you do not have to wait for SAM to start planning and trialling this API to monitor your IRIS instances.

Those of you who keep an eye on developments in the mainstream of IT will be aware that a major upheaval has been occurring over the last 5 or so years, in which JavaScript has exploded in popularity and importance.  Largely as a result of its server-side incarnation - Node.js - it has broken free of just being the scripting language that you use in web browser, to becoming the world's most popular language and enterprise technology of choice.

As soon as I started playing about with Node.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a video worth? Certainly more than typing a post.

Please check out my "Coding talks" on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

1. Analysing InterSystems IRIS System Performance with Yape. Part 1: Installing Yape

Running Yape in a container.

2. Yape Container SQLite iostat InterSystems

Extracting and plotting pButtons data including timeframes and iostat.

This article introduces InterSystems iKnow Entity Browser, a web application which allows to visualize extracted and organized text data mined from a large number of texts, powered by InterSystems iKnow technology, which is also known as InterSystems Text Analytics in InterSystems IRIS. Feel free to play with the demo of this tool or learn more about it on InterSystems Open Exchange.

I started the development of this project in late 2016. From now on, my iKnow Entity Browser is used around the world by those who use InterSystems technology in their stack and those who do text mining.

Now available on Open Exchange is a library of third party charts available to use within DeepSee/InterSystems IRIS BI dashboards. To start, simply download and install, select the new portlet as the widget type, then select the chart type that you desire. If you don't find the type of chart you are looking for, you can easily extend the portlet to implement your desired chart type. These new chart types can be used within existing dashboards or you can create new dashboards using them.

Too often users finding themselves in need of a software solution do not consider “open source” vs. “proprietary” alternative. Most of them either have their go-to favorite developer or just google for reviews and ready-made answers. However, this alternative must be the starting point of their search, as the decision has the most consequences.

It is not an overstatement to say that open source is the future of technology, albeit, it has its own unique challenges. Here is what users, especially corporate users should consider choosing the software for their business needs.

Introduction

In the next few weeks, my coworkers are planning to start using VSCode to code with InterSystems' products. Among the many advantages of that, I would emphasize being able to connect with other technologies, such as GitHub, with ease. Besides, VSCode also offers an extensive extensions store, where you can find many free add-ons that make coding faster and more efficient. Last but not least, to conquer the heart of every developer, it is open source.

With that being said, let's start the tutorial. Feel free to skip some steps if you're comfortable doing them alone.

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.

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.

Last week at the InterSystems BeNeLux Symposium, we announced the publication of the InterSystems iKnow Natural Language Processing technology to Open Source. This enables developers and researchers to take advantage of this unique technology at any level of their application stack, workflow or experiment.

Preview releases are now available for the first version (v1.0) of InterSystems System Alerting and Monitoring (InterSystems SAM for short).
  
InterSystems SAM v1.0 provides a modern monitoring solution for InterSystems IRIS-based products. It allows high-level views of clusters and single-node drilled down metrics-visualization together with alerts notifications.  This first version provides visualization for more than one hundred InterSystems IRIS kernel metrics, and users can extend the default-supplied Grafana template to their liking.
 
V1.0 is meant to be a simple and intuitive baseline. Please help us make it great by trying it and sending us feedback!

SAM can display information from InterSystems-based instance starting with version 2019.4
 
SAM is only available in container format. You will need the SAM Manager container plus a small set of additional open-source components (Prometheus and Grafana) that are added automatically by the composition file.

SAM components and the SAM Manager Community Edition are available from

• The WRC Preview page: as “SAM Components” and “SAM Manager” 
• Externally at the SAM components Github repo & the SAM Manager on Docker Hub if you want to download it before the docker-compose runs (this last link might not be available for few hours but the container is pullable)

If you are traveling or prefer a voice-based  Q&A description on what SAM is, here is a podcast we have prepared for you: 

Motivation

I didn't know about ObjectScript until I started my new job. Objectscript isn't actually a young programming language. Compared to C++, Java and Python, the community isn't as active, but we're keen to make this place more vibrant, aren't we?

I've noticed that some of my colleagues are finding it tricky to get their heads around the class relationships in these huge projects. There aren't any easy-to-use modern class diagram tool for ObjectScript.

Related Work

I have tried relavant works:

- InterSystems class view:
1. https://github.

When you have more than ten thousand users in your database, it becomes time-consuming and inconvenient to assign group access rights through the standard IRIS interface. In this artilce I want to introduce you an application to automate this process.

I’ll show you how to assign and change the role lists for the users, selecting them by context, and I will also show you how to expand this application’s functionality. you know how to apply your work as an administrator and developer to the new features of the well-proven apptools software complex. With the addition of an adminLTE template, you can now quickly and easily create interface interactions for any entity and many functional modules. The goal while developing this toolkit is to write as little JavaScript as possible as well as transfer and implement all the dynamics as much as possible in the ObjectScript.

ObjectScript is a powerful language used in InterSystems products like InterSystems IRIS, enabling developers to build robust applications. To enhance the ObjectScript development experience, the OwnObjectScriptExtension is a Visual Studio Code extension that provides a range of tools and features. In this article, we will explore how the OwnObjectScriptExtension can improve your ObjectScript development workflow.

Writing comprehensive method descriptions is essential for maintaining code clarity and promoting collaboration.

Strap on this jetpack to boost your developer experience in Visual Studio Code.

DX Jetpack for VS Code was my entry for the 2023 Developer Tools Contest, where it achieved 2nd place in the Experts vote and 5th place in the Community vote. It is an extension pack for VS Code, bundling three entirely new extensions created by me, plus a couple that we at George James Software published previously.

The new extensions are:

• gj :: codeSpex
• ObjectScript Class View
• ServerDiff

If you're reluctant to install DX Jetpack right away, why not try it using a dev container? In the dev container is an InterSystems IRIS Community environment augmented with InterSystems Package Manager (IPM) and the isc-codetidy package.

Hi Everyone!

New webinar "Rest API Design and Development" is available now on  InterSystems Developers YouTube Channel:

What is the best free/open source option to generate the database diagram (MER) to the iris or cache persistent classes?

Hi everyone,

I am very pleased to announce that the Readmission Demo has been released as open source. Many thanks to the Solution Factory team that worked hard on making this possible.

Here are the changes:

• It is now running on top of IRIS Community 2019.3.0.308.0.
• It has synthetic data based on Synthea instead of the real data we were using before. But the machine learning models are 100% real
• Image RRLACESrv has been renamed to “image-riskengine”
• Image “readmissionsrv” has been renamed to “image-risksrv"
• We refactored a lot of the code on image-riskengine to look better.

Those of you who run and support older-style legacy systems on IRIS may be interested in learning about and trying out a new framework I've built on top of my colleague Chris Munt's mg_web technology (details at https://github.com/chrisemunt/mg_web).

There are quite a few older-style and legacy applications out there whose useful life can be extended by making their functionality available as REST APIs.  To make this something that can be done quickly and easily, using modern, industrial-strength web servers, I've created what I'm calling mgweb-server:

https://github.

Overview

After having some discussions at Global Summit and using a lot of package managers in my day to day development (npm,nuget,Chocolatey, etc) in addition to recently using the InterSystems Package Manager for some CICD process I'm building using Intersystems IRIS and IRIS 4 Health, I wanted an easy and integrated way to search/view/install packages related to the Intersystems tech stack.

I recently built a VSCode extension for IPM repositories that I will be open sourcing and publishing to the marketplace but wanted create this post to get some feedback from the community.

I recently realized it's been far too long since I talked about the latest features in the InterSystems ObjectScript Extension for Visual Studio Code. 

I'm pleased to announce version 2.12.1 of the ObjectScript extension, containing a number of enhancements that make a developer's life easier. Some highlights are described below, including the #1 requested feature from Global Summit -- XML import! 

As always, find the full list of modifications in the CHANGELOG, including many bug and vulnerability fixes.

Hello!

Want to get 5000 points on GlobalMasters?

I'm launching a bug bounty for a bug with which I've been struggling for the last 4 years. Have tried to resolve it many times, but no  dice - can't track it down.

Here's the issue.

To claim this bounty you need to:

1. Create a pull request with the code to fix the issue outlined here.
2. In the pull request OR in the issue OR in the commit message describe what's the reason for this bug and how your change fixes it.

First come first serve. Bounty would be paid only ONCE for a first working solution.

Challenge details are here.

It's been a while since I've posted about Embedded Git on the Developer Community, and I'd like to provide an update on the massive amount of work we've done this year and where we're going next.

Context

If you're building solutions on IRIS and want to use Git, that's great! Just use VSCode with a local git repo and push your changes out to the server - it's that easy.

Hi Community!

Enjoy watching  the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ InterSystems IRIS and Node.js Overview

Hi ObjectScript developers!

InterSystems ObjectScript is perhaps the best language on the planet to deal with globals - and it is an interpretable language.

Yes, it has a compiler. But even the compiler can compile some lines in ObjectScript which will then fire as bugs during the runtime.

There are some technics on how to avoid that such as unit testing, coding guidelines and your coding experience, of course ;)

Here I want to present to you the yet another approach to how you can reduce the number of errors in your ObjectScript runtime and enforce coding guidelines - it's an ObjectScript Quality tool developed by Lite Solutions, InterSystems solution partner.

See the details below.