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This quick guide shows how to serve HTTPS requests with InterSystems API Management. Advantage here is that you have your certs on one separated server and you don't need to configure each backend web-server separately.

Here's how:

1. Buy the domain name.

2. Adjust DNS records from your domain to the IAM IP address.

3. Generate HTTPS certificate and private key. I use Let's Encrypt - it's free.

4. Start IAM if you didn't already.

5. Send this request to IAM:

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In this article, I would like to talk about the spec-first approach to REST API development.

While traditional code-first REST API development goes like this:

  • Writing code
  • REST-enabling it
  • Documenting it (as a REST API)

Spec-first follows the same steps but reverse. We start with a spec, also doubling as documentation, generate a boilerplate REST app from that and finally write some business logic.

This is advantageous because:

  • You always have relevant and useful documentation for external or frontend developers who want to use your REST API
  • Specification created in OAS (Swagger) can be imported into a variety of tools allowing editing, client generation, API Management, Unit Testing and automation or simplification of many other tasks
  • Improved API architecture. In code-first approach, API is developed method by method so a developer can easily lose track of the overall API architecture, however with the spec-first developer is forced to interact with an API from the position if API consumer which usually helps with designing cleaner API architecture
  • Faster development - as all boilerplate code is automatically generated you won't have to write it, all that's left is developing business logic.
  • Faster feedback loops - consumers can get a view of the API immediately and they can easier offer suggestions simply by modifying the spec

Let's develop our API in a spec-first approach!

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InterSystems API Management (IAM) - a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, enables you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure. In case you missed it, here is the link to the announcement. And here's an article explaining how to start working with IAM.

In this article, we would use InterSystems API Management to Load Balance an API.

In our case, we have 2 InterSystems IRIS instances with /api/atelier REST API that we want to publish for our clients.

There are many different reasons why we might want to do that, such as:

  • Load balancing to spread the workload across servers
  • Blue-green deployment: we have two servers, one "prod", other "dev" and we might want to switch between them
  • Canary deployment: we might publish the new version only on one server and move 1% of clients there
  • High availability configuration
  • etc.
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Article
· Apr 8, 2019 4m read
Should we use computers?

The titular question was quite relevant and often discussed some thirty years ago. The thought went: “Sure, there are industries where computers are the norm, but in my industry we got just fine so far, the benefits are questionable, problems innumerable and unsolved. Can we continue as before or should we embrace this new technology?”

Today, everyone asks the same question but about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. The doubts are the same – lack of expertise, lack of known path, perceived irrelevancy to the industry.

Yet, as before, the correct, even the only possible answer is a resounding yes. Read on to find out why.

Open Exchange app
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Recently I needed a classmethod that returns annotation value based on a name of a activity.

As doing it at runtime seemed inefficient, I wrote compile-time utility that iterates over all business process activities and generates relevant code.

This code could be used in a variety of situations when you need to iterate over business process activities, just add it as a secondary superclass to your BPL processes.

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In this article, I would show how you can upload and download files from InterSystems products via http.

The questions about working with files over http arise fairly often on community and I'm usually linking to my FileServer project which demonstrates file upload/download but I'd like to talk a bit more on how we can serve and receive files from InterSystems products.

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InterSystems products (IRIS, Caché, Ensemble) already include a built-in Apache web server. But the built-in server is designed for the development and administration tasks and thus has certain limitations. Though you may find some useful workarounds for these limitations, the more common approach is to deploy a full-scale web server for your production environment. This article describes how to set up Apache to work with InterSystems products and how to provide HTTPS access. We will be using Ubuntu, but the configuration process is almost the same for all Linux distributions.

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InterSystems IRIS supports publish and subscribe message delivery. Publish and subscribe refers to the technique of routing a message to one or more subscribers based on the fact that those subscribers have previously registered to be notified about messages on a specific topic.

This article demonstrates how several InterSystems IRIS capabilities can work together:

In this article we would send emails about:

  • New workflow tasks
  • Unassigned workflow tasks
  • Uncompleted workflow tasks
  • Ensemble alerts

Email recipients would be determined using Publish/Subscribe operation and each user would receive only digest email whenever possible.

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Generally speaking, InterSystems products supported dynamic objects and JSON for a long while, but version 2016.2 came with a completely new implementation of these features, and the corresponding code was moved from the ObjectScript level to the kernel/C level, which made for a substantial performance boost in these areas. This article is about innovations in the new version and the migration process (including the ways of preserving backward compatibility).

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • Why containers?
  • Containers infrastructure
  • CD using containers
  • CD using ICM
  • Container architecture

In this article, we would talk about building your own container and deploying it.

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • Why containers?
  • Containers infrastructure
  • CD using containers
  • CD using ICM

In this article, we'll build Continuous Delivery with InterSystems Cloud Manager. ICM is a cloud provisioning and deployment solution for applications based on InterSystems IRIS. It allows you to define the desired deployment configuration and ICM would provision it automatically. For more information take a look at First Look: ICM.

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