BPL from 10,000 feet

BPL stands for Business Process Language.
This is an XML format for describing complex information orchestration interactions between systems.
InterSystems Integration engine has for two decades, provided a visual designer to build, configure, and maintain, BPL using a graphical interface.
Think of it like drawing a process flow diagram that can be compiled and deployed.

A customer recently asked if IRIS supported OpenTelemetry as they where seeking to measure the time that IRIS implemented SOAP Services take to complete. The customer already has several other technologies that support OpenTelemetry for process tracing. At this time, InterSystems IRIS (IRIS) do not natively support OpenTelemetry.

The objective of the article is to provide the reader with the following informations:

• Configure and use the FHIR server
• Create an OAuth2 Authorization Server
• Bind the FHIR server to the OAuth2 Authorization Server for support of SMART on FHIR
• Use the interoperability capabilities of IRIS for Health to filter FHIR resources
• Create a custom operation on the FHIR server

Schema of the article:

If you are a customer of the new InterSystems IRIS® Cloud SQL and InterSystems IRIS® Cloud IntegratedML® cloud offerings and want access to the metrics of your deployments and send them to your own Observability platform, here is a quick and dirty way to get it done by sending the metrics to Google Cloud Platform Monitoring (formerly StackDriver).

The invention and popularization of Large Language Models (such as OpenAI's GPT-4) has launched a wave of innovative solutions that can leverage large volumes of unstructured data that was impractical or even impossible to process manually until recently.

I have been using embedded python for more than 2 years now on a daily basis.
May be it's time to share some feedback about this journey.

Why write this feedback? Because, I guess, I'm like most of the people here, an ObjectScript developer, and I think that the community would benefit from this feedback and could better understand the pros & cons of chosing embedded python for developing stuff in IRIS. And also avoid some pitfalls.

• Feedback : Using embedded python daily for 2 years
• Introduction
• Starting with Python
  • Python is not ObjectScript
    • Pep8
    • Modules
    • Dunders
  • Conclusion
• Embedded Python
  • What is Embedded Python ?
  • How to use Embedded Python ?
  • How I use Embedded Python
    • Use Python libraries and code as they were ObjectScript classes
      • With the language tag
      • Without the language tag
      • Conclusion
    • Use a python first approach
      • Example : iris-fhir-python-strategy
      • Remarks
      • Where to find the code
      • How to implement a Strategy
      • Implementation of InteractionsStrategy
      • Implementation of Interactions
      • Interactions in Python
      • Implementation of the abstract python class
      • Too long, do a summary

Django, a high-level web framework written in Python, has become a staple for developers seeking a robust, efficient, and easy-to-learn solution for building web applications. Its popularity stems from its versatility, offering developers an efficient toolkit for building web applications. Integrating Django with InterSystems IRIS introduces a dynamic synergy, providing developers with a comprehensive web development and database management solution. That's why on the Ideas Portal, @Evgeny Shvarov suggested that having Examples to work with IRIS from Django would be beneficial. In this article, we'll explore two projects created to answer the posted idea — Django-iris by @Dmitry Maslennikov and Iris-size-django by @Heloisa Paiva.

I have challenged to create a bot application using Azure Bot that can retrieve and post data to IRIS for Health.

A patient's data has already been registered in the FHIR repository of IRIS for Health.

The patient's MRN is 1001. His name is Taro Yamada. (in Japanese :山田 太郎)

This bot can post new pulse oximeter readings as an observation resource linked to the patient.

It seems like yesterday when we did a small project in Java to test the performance of IRIS, PostgreSQL and MySQL (you can review the article we wrote back in June at the end of this article). If you remember, IRIS was superior to PostgreSQL and clearly superior to MySQL in insertions, with no big difference in queries.

1. IRIS RAG Demo

This demo showcases the powerful synergy between IRIS Vector Search and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), providing a cutting-edge approach to interacting with documents through a conversational interface. Utilizing InterSystems IRIS's newly introduced Vector Search capabilities, this application sets a new standard for retrieving and generating information based on a knowledge base.
The backend, crafted in Python and leveraging the prowess of IRIS and IoP, the LLM model is orca-mini and served by the ollama server.
The frontend is an chatbot written with Streamlit.

Case description

Let’s imagine that you are a Python developer or have a well-trained team specialized in Python, but the deadline you got to analyze some data in IRIS is tight. Of course, InterSystems offers many tools for all kinds of analyses and treatments. However, in the given scenario, it is better to get the job done using the good old Pandas and leave the IRIS for another time.

While starting the development with IRIS we have a distribution kit or in case of Docker we are pulling the docker image and then often we need to initialize it and setup the development environment. We might need to create databases, namespaces, turn on/off some services, create resources. We often need to import code and data into IRIS instance and run some custom code to init the solution.

And there plenty of templates on Open Exchange where we suggest how to init REST, Interoperability, Analytics, Fullstack and many other templates with ObjectScript. What if we want to use only Python to setup the development environment for Embedded Python project with IRIS?

So, the recent release of Embedded Python template is the pure python boilerplate that could be a starting point for developers that build python projects with no need to use and learn ObjectScript. This article expresses how this template could be used to initialize IRIS. Here we go!

Why should you connect Flask to InterSystems IRIS?

The first thing that comes to mind when we think about combining Flask with IRIS is a portal to interact with your clients and partners. A good example would be a website for patients to access their clinical exams. Of course, this case would require a whole new layer of security, which we did not cover in our last article. However, we can effortlessly add it with Werkzeug, for instance.

This article is a simple quick starter (what I did was) with SqlDatabaseChain.

Hope this ignites some interest.

Many thanks to:

sqlalchemy-iris author @Dmitry Maslennikov

Your project made this possible today.

The article script uses openai API so caution not to share table information and records externally, that you didn't intend to.

A local model could be plugged in , instead if needed.