Some time ago GitHub, has announced the new feature, GitHub Codespaces. It gives an ability to run VSCode in the browser, with almost the same power as it would run locally on your machine, but also with a power of clouds, so, you are able to choose the machine type with up to 32 CPU cores and 64 GB of RAM.

Looks impressive, is not it? But how it could help us, to work with projects driven by InterSystems IRIS? Let's have a look, how to configure it for us.

Found one interesting behaviour in one system with Ensemble. Some Request class has a property with type %XML.CharacterStream by design, this class is the heaviest request in the system, and with profiling journal files, it got about 40% of the file. When I counted all the sizes of such streams per one day and found that the real stored data is three times less. After deep inspecting the journal file, I found the first save of stream data, then removing previously stored data, and saving again and there were no reasons to change the content of the stream, it should be stored only once.

Google has one intersting tool named Data Studio. This tool allows creating some interactive dashboards, based on your data, available from the internet. It already offers hundreds of connectors to any sort of data developed by the community. As well as some amount of community developed visualizing. And most importantly, Google offers a way to develop your own connector to your data. 

FHIRaaS provides a REST API, and it's available from the internet. So I've decided to try to create some basic report on data stored there. And in the end, I got this.

I have some system with heavy production. There are about 500GB of journals daily. And I'm looking at the ways, how to decrease the amount of data that appeared there.

I found no way, on how to split have the journal separately for mirroring databases and for others. So, I'm thinking about moving some of the globals to CACHETEMP. So, they will disappear from journals. So, thinking about Ens.* globals, I have about 30% of data in journals just for such data. Which production data can be safely moved to CACHETEMP, with no issues for mirroring?

In addition to IntelliJ IDEA, it's now possible to configure SublimeText3 to be able to compile code there too. And what you will need is just the language server I did.

Let me introduce the support of InterSystems IRIS in IntelliJ IDEA. This plugin adds Syntax Highlighting support for ObjectScript, and auto import and compile on the server after saving a changed file. It uses LanguageServer written in Rust, where was added an ability to import and compile code.

Hello everyone, let me introduce, one of my latest projects. It is a DataSource plugin for Grafana, which can connect directly to InterSystems IRIS and gather any data (in the future). 

What do you think If I will say you, that very soon you will be able to connect to IRIS from the application written in Rust.

What is Rust

Rust is a multi-paradigm programming language designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but can guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker to validate references. Rust achieves memory safety without garbage collection, and reference counting is optional. (c) Wikipedia

Most loved language for the last five years by the time of StackOverflow survey 2020.

What is possible right now.

Let's imagine you have to implement a method with a definition

/// Set value to %session.Data
ClassMethod setValue(params...) As %Status
{
}

How it should work

do ..setValue("key1", "val")

is equal to

set %session.Data("key1") = "val"

and 

do ..setValue("key1", "key2", "key3", "key4", "val")

is equal to 

set %session.Data("key1", "key2", "key3", "key4") = "val"

so, quite simple, any amount of arguments, while the latest one is a value, and any previous is an index, should accept at least 2 arguments.

How would you implement this method?

Let's imagine if you would like to write some real web application, for instance, some simple clone of medium.com. Such sort of application can be written using any different language on the backend side, or with any framework on the frontend side. So many ways to do the same application, and you can look at this project. Which offers a bunch of frontends and backends realizations for exactly the same application. And you can easily mix them, any chosen frontend should work with any backend.

Let me introduce the same application realization for InterSystems IRIS on a backend side.

Doing a new project with %JSON.Adaptor, unexpectedly realized that %JSON.Adaptor does not support export to native JSON. %JSONExport just outputs directly to the current device, and there are two more methods %JSONExportToString, and %JSONExportToStream.

In conjunction with generating REST from swagger specification, where any generated method accepts as a result %DynamicObject, which is good. 

I have multiple places in my REST where I have to return JSON for an object, but I have to modify the result a bit, just extend it with some other way.

The use of Source Code Control systems in development is important. And there are a few systems known in the world, like GIT, SVN (Subversion), Perforce, Mercurial. Where the most popular nowadays is the git. Using it is very useful in many cases, but mostly it depends on the code as text, which can be compared between commits, branches, or versions of releases and so on.

Just curious, why StructureDefinition is very empty on freshly configured FHIR server r4?

I supposed it should contain definitions for any resources available on a particular realization?

I'm used iris-fhir-template project. 

Is it possible to load that data, that should be correct for InterSystems FHIR realization?

Since IRIS 2020.1, changed the way how embedded SQL compiled. Now it compiles upon the first execution of such queries.

Is there any way, I could switch that feature back to the previous behavior, or get some more control over it?

We deliver our software as deployed, and we would like to have it well prepared. Another solution would suit us, if we could change the generated classname of the cached query to something which we would be possible to map. At the moment it generates classes %sqlcq.NAMESPACE, but our customers may use different namespaces.

When a company is quite large and many different applications used by employees. But while those applications are mostly completely different, how to make it possible to not force users to enter credentials as many times as many applications they would like to use. The best way is to use SSO, so, it will be possible to have a portal, where users could launch any application used in a company. There are many different ways how to give access to your application by using the SSO mechanism, and some of them are:

• OAuth2
• Kerberos
• SAML

InterSystems already supports OAuth2 and can be quite easily deal with Kerberos. But I would like to discuss about using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language).

Okay, we've got a quite useful way to very easily Import and export our objects as JSON, similar to what we already had before for XML.

So, It's a %JSON.Adaptor. But the issue here I faced with, working with Stream properties. 

I have an example, when I generate an object, with stream binary stream properties. Export and Import the same, but getting the different resulting objects, depends on the original size of streams.

Class User.Test Extends (%JSON.Adaptor, %RegisteredObject)
{ 

Property Name As %String(%JSONFIELDNAME = "name"); 

Property HexStream As %Stream.

I am glad to say that VSCode-ObjectScript reached 4000 installs. Thanks to all of you who use it in their work.

VSCode-ObjectScript is an extension for VSCode which allows you to develop InterSystems based applications on ObjectScript using the modern code editor developed by Microsoft. Choice #1 editor amongst all developers worldwide by Stackoverflow survey 2019.

Some short notes about how to install and configure it you can find here.

If you need any help with a migration process of your development team to VSCode, please contact us by info@caretdev.com.

I hope you already know one of my projects Cache Blocks Explorer. I've recently renamed it to Blocks Explorer.

For the recent contest, I've added a new feature, the ability to generate a static picture of any Cache or IRIS database. Like below. Where unique globals have a unique color. This is how looks like inside 9.5GB database. Where 1 pixel represents one block. By link on image you will get even bigger image, with more detalization.

When I tried to migrate one of ZEN applications to IRIS from 2018.1 I'm faced with the issue with Login Page, in this case used some ZEN page, completely customized. But when a user tries to get access, he gets the error like below.

The requested URL /csp/user/User.Login.cls was not found on this server.

I tried to test it with a fresh just created login page class

Class User.Login Extends %CSP.Page
{ 

ClassMethod OnPage() As %Status
{
  &html<<h1>Hello</1>>
  Quit $$$OK
} 

}

Set it to /csp/user application as Login page, and

$ curl http://localhost:32784/csp/user/menu.

In one of the projects, when we have ECP with 10 ECP application servers, from time to time we faced the issue when our journals fail to purge, due to open transactions. While we have about 100-150 GB journal files per day, it quite quickly became a big issue, and with mirroring a very big issue. Mostly we just rebooted our ECP Data server, so it searches rollbacks any transactions, but such process is too long, may steal a few hours. I did not find any way, how to get the list of the open transactions from one place from ECP Data Server. We just migrated our Data server to 2018.1.

Hi all, it's finally time for the next release of VSCode ObjectScript extension. So what's new in this release.

• Debugging support, for classes, routines and attach to a running process

• Files in Server Explorer now can be edited

• Added more details about connection errors

• Improvements in Server Explorer build tree

• Fixed memory leak when exporting large amount of files
• Server view can be opened in explorer as virtual file system with schema `isfs://`
• Option to suppress popup information message about successful compile, ("objectscript.suppressCompileMessages": true)
• Export, addCategory setting have more flexibility in naming category for exported items
• Formatting for commands and functions, as Word, UPPER or lower
• Some improvements in syntax highlighting
• Some other small fixes

I wanted to write it as a comment to article of @Evgeny Shvarov . But it happens to be so long, so, decided to post it separately.

I would like to add a bit of clarification about how docker uses disk space and how to clean it.  I use macOS, so, everything below, is mostly for macOS, but docker commands suit any platform.

Hi all, I have released the latest version of VSCode extension for ObjectScript already a month ago, and finally a time for the info about this new release.

So, what's new in the release:

What's new in this version

• added export setting "objectscript.export.addCategory" if enabled uses the previous behaviour, adds category folder to export folder, disabled by default
• added Server actions menu, by clicking on server info from status bar. Open Management portal, Class Reference and toggle connection.
• Class Suggestion in ##class, Extends, As, CompileAfter, DependsOn, PropertyClass
• $SYSTEM suggestion by Classes from %SYSTEM
• Import and compile folder or file by context menu in File Explorer
• Server Explorer, now possible to open any other namespace
• Macros suggestion

For details how it works now, look further.

Hey developers,

I have great news for you. A few days ago, GitHub was updated with the latest version of linguist project, which is being used to recognize source code types in repositories. It helps to determine which programming language had been used in every file of the repository. Repository statistics section shows the results of this module work.

Also, you can search across all available GitHub repositories for any chosen language. 

There are many projects which work on InterSystems products, and they are not always written only in ObjectScript. I think some of you working with different programming languages and already have some experience with other editors, and hope you already have a favourite online editor. 

My current choice is VSCode, whereas you may already know I have added an extension to support ObjectScript.

My extension has recently reached first 1000 installations. And thank you all of you, who use it and fill issues and even contribute to the project.

The latest version of the extension already has more not yet announced features. I'm going to make this announcement later.

Sometime ago GitHub announced their new feature - sponsoring OpenSource projects stored on GitHub.

I would like to invite you to donate to the project if you found it useful for you or just wanted to support it.

You can do it by clicking the new Sponsor button appeared on GitHub.

Well, we now have two different platforms Caché and IRIS. With so many changes, that it makes so many difficulties to have the same sources for both platforms. I'm not arguing about the reasons for it. Some of the changes are really reasonable.

It's good when I can import code from Caché to IRIS and get it worked after all background job was done. In Caché we have %CacheStorage type used for Storages. In IRIS it automatically converts to %Storage.Persistent. So, If I develop on IRIS, I will have incompatible sources for Caché.

So, it is one of the problems, and I expect more.

This is a continuation of my story about the development of my project isc-tar started in the first part.

Just having tests is not enough, it does not mean that you will run tests after all changes. Running tests should be automated, and when you cover all your functionality with tests, everything should work well after any change in any place.  And Continuous Integration (CI) helps to keep the code and deployment procedure with as fewer bugs as possible and automates the routine procedures, like publishing releases.

I use GitHub to store the source code. And some time ago GitHub started to work on its own CI/CD platform and named it GitHub Actions. It is not widely available, yet. You have to be signed as a beta tester for this feature, as I did. GitHub Actions uses quite a different way how to deal with a build workflow. What is important that Github Actions allows to use Docker, and it’s quite easy to customize available actions. And interesting that GitHub Actions is really much bigger than any classic CI like we have in Travis, Circle or Gitlab CI and so on. You can find more in the official documentation.

I am just recently announced my project isc-tar. But sometimes it is not less interesting what’s behind the scene: how it was built, how it works and what happens around the project. Here is the story:

• How to develop this project
• How to test it
• How to release new versions for publishing
• And finally how to automate all above
• Continuous integration

So, I would like to tell all about it.

I'm sure most of you have already familiar with the possibility of using GZIP in InterSystems products. But, the problem is that GZIP working only with one file or stream, and it does not support folders. When you work in Unix systems, there is a possibility how to solve it, using tar compress tool which goes with every Linux system from out of the box. But what to do if you have work on Windows as well, which does not have it. 

I am pleased to offer you my new project isc-tar, which will help you do not care about operating system, and deal with tar files anywhere.