While working with external languages for IRIS (such as Python and Node.js), one of the first things you must accomplish is making a connection to an IRIS instance.

For instance, to make a connection in python (from https://pypi.org/project/intersystems-irispython/):

import iris

# Open a connection to the server
args = {
	'hostname':'127.0.0.1', 
	'port': 1972,
	'namespace':'USER', 
	'username':'username', 
	'password':'password'
}
conn = iris.connect(**args)

# Create an iris object
irispy = iris.createIRIS(conn)

# Create a global array in the USER namespace on the server
irispy.set("myGlobal", "hello world!") 

Hi Developers,

We are happy to announce the new InterSystems online programming contest:

🏆 InterSystems .Net, Java, Python, and JavaScript Contest 🏆

Duration: September 22 - October 12, 2025

Prize pool: $12,000

Hey Community!

We're happy to share a new video from our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯  Python Interoperability Productions @ Ready 2025

I’ve been exploring options for connecting Google Cloud Pub/Sub with InterSystems IRIS/HealthShare, but I noticed that IRIS doesn’t seem to ship with any native inbound/outbound adapters for Pub/Sub. Out of the box, IRIS offers adapters for technologies like Kafka, HTTP, FTP, and JDBC, which are great for many use cases, but Pub/Sub appears to be missing from the list.

Has anyone here implemented such an integration successfully?

For example:

• Would it make sense to leverage IRIS’s Business Service + REST API adapter to connect to Google’s Pub/Sub REST endpoints?

Vanna.AI - Personalized AI InterSystems OMOP Agent

Along this OMOP Journey, from the OHDSI book to Achilles, you can begin to understand the power of the OMOP Common Data Model when you see the mix of well written R and SQL deriving results for large scale analytics that are shareable across organizations. I however do not have a third normal form brain and about a month ago on the Journey we employed Databricks Genie to generate sql for us utilizing InterSystems OMOP and Python interoperability.

These are the strategic plans of my example for the External Languages Contest 2025

In the previous article, we saw how to build a customer service AI agent with smolagents and InterSystems IRIS, combining SQL, RAG with vector search, and interoperability.

In that case, we used cloud models (OpenAI) for the LLM and embeddings.

This time, we’ll take it one step further: running the same agent, but with local models thanks to Ollama.

Interoperability on Python (IoP) is a proof-of-concept project designed to showcase the power of the InterSystems IRIS Interoperability Framework when combined with a Python-first approach.IoP leverages Embedded Python (a feature of InterSystems IRIS) to enable developers to write interoperability components in Python, which can seamlessly integrate with the robust IRIS platform. This guide has been crafted for beginners and provides a comprehensive introduction to IoP, its setup, and practical steps to create your first interoperability component. By the end of this article, you will get a clear understanding of how to use IoP to build scalable, Python-based interoperability solutions.

Or can I change namespaces within one connection object?

This article is a continuation of the IRIS JSON project and features additional methods and insights.

Let's continue with the instance methods

%GetTypeOf(Key)

This instance method is used to determine the JSON data type of the %DynamicObject or %DynamicArray.

It returns one of the following strings:

USER>Set1

I have a custom Buffer class which is designed to capture written/printed statements to the device, to be able to transform the captured text to string or stream type. I have used this in ObjectScript to capture ObjectScript write statements and return a string. I would like to try to use this with a [ Language = python ] method as follows. This class will be called by a scheduled task.

/// ObjectScript code which initializes buffer to capture statements written in nested method callClassMethodset

Reviewing my published packages, I identified a nasty bug in IRIS Native API

• There is a method in  %Net.DB.Iris named function ()
• It's equivalent to  ObjectScript $$label^routine(param) 
• It used to work fine 2 years ago, when I published my command-line-extension packages
• Now it is broken since at least 1 year and throws <PROTECT>
• I identified it for ObjecScript, Java, Python, Node.js
• It is reported as WRC# 1002589
• For all 4 cases, I also verified a workaround
  • Instead of calling an ObjectScript Function you call a Classmethod
  • It's by %Net.DB.Iris ClassMethodValue(.

I am brand new to using AI. I downloaded some medical visit progress notes from my Patient Portal. I extracted text from PDF files. I found a YouTube video that showed how to extract metadata using an OpenAI query / prompt such as this one:

ollama-ai-iris/data/prompts/medical_progress_notes_prompt.txt at main · oliverwilms/ollama-ai-iris
 

I combined @Rodolfo Pscheidt Jr https://github.com/RodolfoPscheidtJr/ollama-ai-iris with some files from @Guillaume Rongier https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/iris-rag-demo.

I attempted to run

python3 query_data.

In this section, we will explore how to use Python as the primary language in IRIS, allowing you to write your application logic in Python while still leveraging the power of IRIS.

• Introduction Python First Approach in IRIS
  • How to use it (irispython)
    • What is irispython?
    • Example of using irispython
    • Pros
    • Cons
    • Conclusion
  • Using WSGI
    • How to use it
    • Example of using WSGI
    • Pros
    • Cons
    • Conclusion
  • DB-API
    • How to use it
    • Example of using DB-API
    • Pros
    • Cons
    • Alternatives
    • Conclusion
  • Notebook
    • How to use it
    • Example of using Notebook
    • Pros
    • Cons
    • Conclusion
• Bonus Section
  • Using a native interpreter (no irispython)
    • How to use it
    • Pros
    • Cons
  • DB-API Community Edition
    • How to use it
    • Example of using DB-API
    • Pros
    • Cons
  • Debugging Python Code in IRIS
    • How to use it
    • Pros
    • Cons
    • Conclusion
  • IoP (Interoperability on Python)
• Conclusion

Now that we have a good understanding of Python and its features, let's explore how we can leverage Python within IRIS.

• Introduction to Python in IRIS
• Language Tag
  • How to use it?
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Conclusion
• Importing Python Modules (pypi modules)
  • How to use it
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Conclusion
• Importing Python Modules (custom modules)
  • How to use it
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Conclusion

Sending emails is a common requirement in integration scenarios — whether for client reminders, automatic reports, or transaction confirmations. Static messages quickly become hard to maintain and personalize. This is where the templated_email module comes in, combining InterSystems IRIS Interoperability with the power of Jinja2 templates.

Why Jinja2 for Emails

Jinja2 is a popular templating engine from the Python ecosystem that enables fully dynamic content generation.

This will be a short article about Python dunder methods, also known as magic methods.

What are Dunder Methods?

Dunder methods are special methods in Python that start and end with double underscores (__). They allow you to define the behavior of your objects for built-in operations, such as addition, subtraction, string representation, and more.

Some common dunder methods include:

• __init__(self, ...): Called when an object is created.
  • Like our %OnNew method in ObjectScript.
• __str__(self): Called by the built-in function and print to represent the object as a string.

Are you curious about how to run Python scripts directly in your InterSystems IRIS or Caché terminal? 🤔 Good news it's easy! 😆 IRIS supports Embedded Python, allowing you to use Python interactively within its terminal environment. 

How to access the Python Shell?

To launch the Python shell from the IRIS terminal, simply run the following command:

do##class%SYS.Python

This opens an interactive Python shell inside the IRIS terminal. From here, you can write and run Python code just as you would in a normal Python environment.

Modules what a topic! We don't have this notion in ObjectScript, but it's a fundamental concept in Python. Let's discover it together.

What is a Module?

I see modules as an intermediate layer between classes and packages. Let see it by example.

A bad example :

# MyClass.py
class MyClass:
    def my_method(self):
        print("Hello from MyClass!")

When you try to use this class in another script, you would do:

# class_usage.py
from MyClass import MyClass # weird, right?

my_instance = MyClass()
my_instance.my_method()

Why this is a bad example?

This will be a short article about PEP 8, the Python style guide.

What is PEP 8?

In a nutshell, PEP 8 provides guidelines and best practices on how to write Python code.

🛠️ Managing InterSystems InterSystems API Manager (IAM = Kong Gateway) configurations in CI/CD

🔍 Context: InterSystems IAM configurations 

As part of integrating InterSystems IRIS into a secure and controlled environment, InterSystems IAM relies on Kong Gateway to manage exposed APIs.
Kong acts as a modern API Gateway, capable of handling authentication, security, traffic management, plugins, and more.

However, maintaining consistent Kong configurations (routes, services, plugins, etc.) across different environments (development, testing, production) is a major challenge.

This will be an introduction to Python programming in the context of IRIS.

Before anything I will cover an important topic: How python works, this will help you understand some issues and limitations you may encounter when working with Python in IRIS.

All the articles and examples can be found in this git repository: iris-python-article

How Python works

Interpreted Language

Python is an interpreted language, which means that the code is executed line by line at runtime even when you import a script.

What does this mean ? Let's take a look at the following code:

# introduction.py

def my_function():
    print("Hello, World!")

my_function()

Hey Community!

We're happy to share the next video in the "Code to Care" series on our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯  Agentic AI in Action: Building a Decision-Making Loop with LLMs

For my intern project, I am building a Flask REST API backend. My goal is to host it on InterSystems IRIS using the WSGI interface. This is a relatively new approach and is currently only being used in a handful of projects such as AskMe. To help others get started, I decided to write this article to simplify the process.

Creating a Basic Flask App

First, let’s create a minimal Flask application. Here is the code:

fromimportfromdeftest()

This simple app runs a Flask server with one API endpoint at /test that returns the text “Test.”

Let's analyze our code line by line:

from

• We are using Flask

Hello,

I'm trying to connect a Python backend application to an InterSystems IRIS Community Edition instance running in a Docker container on an AWS EC2 instance. I'm facing persistent connection issues and an SSL Error despite the Superserver apparently having SSL disabled. I'm hoping for some insight into what might be causing this contradictory behavior.

My Setup:

• InterSystems IRIS: Community Edition (Docker image intersystems/iris-community:2025.1)
• Deployment: AWS EC2 (Ubuntu) instance.
• Port Mapping: Host port 9091 mapped to container port 1972 (Superserver).

I am writing this post primarily to gather an informal consensus on how developers are using Python in conjunction with IRIS, so please respond to the poll at the end of this article! In the body of the article, I'll give some background on each choice provided, as well as the advantages for each, but feel free to skim over it and just respond to the poll.

As most of you are probably aware, Python is currently the most popular programming language among developers around the world - and for good reason.

I was wondering what best practice was for using macros in Embedded Python, i.e. iris.execute('$$$MACRO()') or something else. Does anyone have insight into this?

Learn how to design scalable, autonomous AI agents that combine reasoning, vector search, and tool integration using LangGraph.

Too Long; Didn't Read

• AI Agents are proactive systems that combine memory, context, and initiative to automate tasks beyond simple chatbots.
• LangGraph is a framework that enables us to build complex AI workflows, utilizing nodes (tasks) and edges (connections) with built-in state management.

INTRO

Barricade is a tool developed by ICCA Ops to streamline and scale support for FHIR-to-OMOP transformations for InterSystems OMOP. Our clients will be using InterSystems OMOP to transform FHIR data to this OMOP structure. As a managed service, our job is to troubleshoot any issues that come with the transformation process. Barricade is the ideal tool to aid us in this process for a variety of reasons. First, effective support demands knowledge across FHIR standards, the OHDSI OMOP model, and InterSystems-specific operational workflows—all highly specialized areas.

Hey Community!

We're happy to share the next video in the "Code to Care" series on our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯  Chaining LLMs for Better Results using Agentic AI