Hi Nezla. It sounds like you want to do Python-only development. In that case, you'll want to write a Flask app or similar. Search this site for Flask and you'll find many articles, such as this one: https://community.intersystems.com/post/simplest-template-rest-crud-inte.... 

Let me comment separately on the venv question. Remember, you could choose to run your flask app in a separate container and use Docker compose to orchestrate the containers. That will give you all the normal venv options.

If, however, you choose to run your flask app embedded in IRIS (running using embedded Python), you are running in-process with IRIS, and that process can't load and unload Python virtual environments while maintaining the benefits of running in embedded mode, so therefore the implication for containerization is that yes you do have to create a new base image when you want to add a package, but that's the tradeoff.

Have you seen https://github.com/grongierisc/iris-flask-template? This agrees with a lot of what you found out, but might be a little simpler. The only thing I changed for my work is my pip3 install command in Dockerfile adds a --target as recommended by @Dmitry Maslennikov:

RUN pip3 install -r requirements.txt --target /usr/irissys/mgr/python

Thank you!

pip install sqlalchemy-iris[intersystems]

returns: 

zsh: no matches found: sqlalchemy-iris[intersystems]

Could this be because I'm on an M2 Mac?

Congratulations @Mihoko Iijima!

Nice, @Trent Chismar! Could you publish this to OpenExchange?

Hi @John McBride. We don't currently support formal debugging for embedded Python, so you won't be able to set breakpoints, etc. We're working on this high priority functionality.

Thanks @John Murray for all your expert contributions to the InterSystems/VS Code ecosystem! 

For Chrome, if you know how to modify HTTP headers directly, this one seems reliable and popular (but I haven't tried it): https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/requestly-intercept-modif/mdnle...

So now the problem isn't installing the Python library, but connecting to IRIS, correct? If you're using the above code on both servers, is the connection info the same on both servers?

Here's the link to InterSystems Components. It requires a login. 

Congratulations!

Great suggestions here. This reminds me the folks at myCTS once again showed off webHERALD at Global Summit this year. Another option in this space. @Armin Forstner could say more. 

Sounds very promising and a big time saver!

As @Brett Saviano says, if you simply need to work with JSON data, use dynamic objects. If your question is really about the future of data-centric web development with InterSystems, let me step back and offer a higher level viewpoint. %ZEN has been deprecated because it requires some browser features that have been deprecated and may go away at any time. Therefore, we cannot continue to recommend usage to our developers when browsers could break Zen applications and any moment. The DeepSee v3 REST API uses %ZEN classes because it has not been rewritten since the deprecation. 

Zen was developed a long time ago, and many great application development frameworks have gained popularity since then. There are examples of Angular, React, Django and more recently, Streamlit being used in conjunction with IRIS.

There doesn't seem to be a strong desire for offering a proprietary web development framework that could never achieve feature parity with those mass market offerings, and could only beat them in providing faster, more efficient access to the data layer. But I'd love to hear more voices from the community on this topic.