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.

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.

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.

I’m pleased to announce the release of tree-sitter-objectscript, a new open-source tree-sitter grammar that brings first-class ObjectScript support to modern editors. If you caught the preview at READY ’25, you’ll be glad to know it’s now up on Github:

https://github.com/intersystems/tree-sitter-objectscript

What Does It Provide?

• Fast & Precise Parsing: A powerful grammar for ObjectScript, enabling real-time syntax parsing, smart highlighting, and structural editing in modern code editors.
• Polyglot-Awareness: ObjectScript .cls

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Profiling CCD Documents with LEAD North’s CCD Data Profiler
Ever opened a CCD and been greeted by a wall of tangled XML? You’re not alone. Despite being a core format for clinical data exchange, CCD's are notoriously dense, verbose, and unfriendly to the human eye. For developers and analysts trying to validate their structure or extract meaningful insights, navigating these documents can feel more like archaeology than engineering.

InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence provides the Cube Registry as an interface for managing and scheduling build and synchronize tasks for your cubes. The Cube Event Monitor is a new tool on Open Exchange to help you keep track of those events' status and performance, the number of records being updated, and any build errors (errors when processing individual records) that have occurred.

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: 

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.

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.

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.

The Application Services team is pleased to announce the release of git-source-control version 2.4.0, introducing several new features to the open-source project.

For those unfamiliar, git-source-control is an embedded (or "server-side") source control tool for InterSystems products, installed through the InterSystems Package Manager.

Here are the key additions to the 2.4.0 release:

1. Basic Mode

Basic mode presents an overall great simplification to the git workflow, suitable for users with less knowledge of git as a source control tool.

Hi folks,

I have published a new package on OEX.

In short, it is a string datatype that support various configuration options and flexibility.

Business Case

1. You have some library classes and other reusable structures that you use across systems.
2. You have a "multi-tenant" environment where one code base is shared amongst tenants, which each have their own namespaces configured.
   1. Specific rules and business processes are stored in that tenant's namespace.
   2. The core class structures are the same.

As a part of the IRIS Python 2024 contest, my colleague Damir and I went with an idea to build a platform called ShelterShare for connecting victims and volunteers for shelter requests . To do so we chose django as a framework and proceeded to build the first version with 3 different docker containers, django, iris and nginx which would then utilize IRIS as a pure Database engine via the beautifly composed django_iris (cudos to Dimitry). As we were progressing fast, we decided to explore the option of running it within the same container as IRIS by utilizing WSGI added in 2024.1.

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.

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.