Systems Integration, designing and building (web)applications is my main area of expertise. Specialized in ObjectScript, JavaScript, Node.js/QEWD.js, Vue.js/Nuxt, InterSystems IRIS/Caché, C(++,#)
I did initial testing with mg_web over the weekend, it's impressive how easy you can use this module to create web pages with a Caché/IRIS instance as back-end. With the latest version, you can not only write your webpages in ObjectScript, but now also completely in JavaScript (using your data in IRIS)!
The nice thing is that this module also supports all three major webservers (Apache, Nginx and IIS).
Benchmark results look very impressive: e.g. with an IRIS db as back-end you see orders of magnitude faster performance compared to some well-known databases.
Hi Rob, seeing the results in the mg-showcase benchmark MD files, the speed is very impressive - you get near in-memory speed with a database!
This is very impressive work with the mg-dbx-napi connector to say at the least!
Hi @John McBride I'm using node.js front & back-ends for many years in production. As Rob also mentions, support by InterSystems drivers is quite basic. To write scalable applications for use in production environments "the JavaScript way" you need a real Node.js back-end architecture (as mentioned in Rob's reply here) provided by the mg-dbx-napi driver (this is just the low-level driver for testing) and the QOper8 module combined with Fastify or Express (the back-end that I'm using typically).
I'm writing full-stack JS applications for 10+ years now, I used Sencha ExtJS front-end technology in the beginning but currently I'm using Vue.js and Nuxt front-ends. I'm using the REST endpoints for Vue.js and Nuxt apps served by QOper8 back-end servers. It's even possible to integrate QOper8 directly into Nuxt's server api's, but I didn't have the time yet to try this out. I'm using JS technology for 10+ years now in production and these applications are very stable.
As you'll notice, Node.js support for IRIS is mature and well supported by open-source technology. And you can take advantage of the complete Node.js module ecosystem and use it in your applications using IRIS as the underlying database + application server.
If you need to integrate a web application without a JS back-end, you can use mg_web: I'm using this technology since the year 2000 (!) and for some applications, I'm still using it without any code changes since then. This is also a very mature and well-tested back-end you can use if you want to write your application code directly in IRIS ObjectScript, without Node.js as back-end technology.