Article
· Dec 20, 2021 1m read
Holiday Reading: What Lies Beneath!

For those of you who might be new to IRIS, and even those who have used Cache or IRIS for some time but want to explore beyond its usually-assumed boundaries and practices, you might want to dive into this detailed exploration of the database engine that is at its heart, and discover just what you can really do with it, going way beyond what InterSystems have done with it for you.

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At the heart of IRIS and Cache is a very interesting database architecture that we, at M/Gateway Developments, refer to as "Global Storage". If you ever wanted to know more about the fundamentals and capabilities of this underlying database, you might want to read a major analysis we've put together:

https://github.com/robtweed/global_storage

Amongst other things you'll discover that:

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QEWD is assumed by most people to only integrate with IRIS (or Cache) via a connection through IRIS's high-performance C interface. This requires QEWD (and its Node.js environment) to be installed and configured on the same machine as IRIS.

I'm frequently asked if QEWD can run on a separate server (or servers), and access IRIS (or Cache) over a network connection. The answer is yes it can, but the information on how to set it up in this way has been admittedly a bit tricky to discover.

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Those of you who are following the FullStack competition here in the Developer Community will know that I submitted an entry named qewd-conduit. I wanted to summarise why I think it's something worth you taking a bit of time to check out.

qewd-conduit uses the Node.js-based QEWD framework alongside IRIS to implement the back-end REST APIs for something known as the RealWorld Conduit application:

https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld

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There's a new and exciting enhancement to QEWD that has just been released - it's an additional layer of abstraction known as QEWD-Up. QEWD-Up hides away all the mechanics of QEWD itself, allowing you to focus on just your REST APIs and the code that implements them.

Additionally, and importantly, QEWD-Up simplifies the maintenance of your REST APIs, allowing you (and others) to quickly and easily understand their life-cycle and implementation.

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Quite a few enhancements have appeared over recent months in QEWD for easing and simplifying the creation of REST-based services. It's now even more slick and powerful, allowing you to very quickly create very high-performance, highly-scalable REST (and Web) services that make use of Cache.

I've therefore updated the training presentation deck (Part 31 on developing REST Services with QEWD). It describes all the new features with worked examples. See:

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Article
· Jul 31, 2017 5m read
Introduction to QEWD Micro-Services

In my previous posting about the new support in QEWD for JSON Web Token (JWT) support, I mentioned that it was a key step in enabling Micro-Service support in QEWD. In this post I'll give some background to how they work and the thinking behind them.

If you haven't heard about Micro-Services and/or want to learn more, there's lots of information available if you do a Google Search. Here's a good starting point:

https://smartbear.com/learn/api-design/what-are-microservices/

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Article
· May 22, 2017 1m read
WebSockets v REST?

Most frameworks support either REST or WebSockets, and don't make it easy to switch between the two, and/or support both styles of application at the same time. WebSockets offer many advantages over REST, eg:

- most benchmarks show WebSocket messaging to be significantly faster than over HTTP

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Something that shot up the popularity stakes last week was this article on a very interesting initiative: RealWorld:

https://medium.com/@ericsimons/introducing-realworld-6016654d36b5

I decided it would be a good idea to use this as a way of creating an exemplar implementation of a RESTful back-end using QEWD against their published API (https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld/tree/master/api)

The results are here:

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Article
· Apr 18, 2017 1m read
Having your Node.js Cake and Eating It Too

I've mentioned the QEWD project in this group before: it's a Node.js-based platform for web, Native and REST applications which tightly integrates with Cache. It uses a somewhat different philosophy to the use of Node.js than the norm, and I've now published an article that explains this approach and the unique benefits that arise as a result.

It turns out that, integrated via QEWD, Cache is an ideal bed-fellow for Node.js. QEWD makes the integration of Cache and Node.js exceptionally fast, simple and intuitive to use, but also extremely powerful.

Read the article here:

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Today I'm releasing a new EWD 3 module - ewd-feder8.

ewd-feder8 is a federation or integration platform, built as an extension of the EWD 3 ewd-xpress module. So what does it do and what's it for?

It's all about federating and integrating multiple web or REST service end-points.

At its simplest you can use it as a proxy server in front of a remote web service or REST end-point.

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