OK, thanks for the feedback. We're indeed looking into those additional windowing functions to go beyond our %FOREACH SQL extension, but it's not (yet) on the short-term agenda. Customer demand like yours of course helps us properly prioritize what should go on there.

Hi Dmitry,

Zen is indeed no longer a central piece of our application development strategy. We'll support it for some time to come (your Zen app still works on IRIS), but our focus is on providing a fast and scalable data management platform rather than GUI libraries. In that sense, you may already have noticed that recent courses we published on the topic of application development focus on leveraging the right technologies to connect to the backend (i.e. REST) and suggest using best-of-breed third-party technologies (i.e. Angular) for web development.

InterSystems IRIS is a new product where we're taking advantage of our Caché & Ensemble heritage. It's meant to address today's challenges when building critical applications and we've indeed leveraged a number of capabilities from those products, but also added a few significant new ones like containers, cloud & horizontal scalability. We'll be providing an overview of elements to check for Caché & Ensemble customers that would like to migrate to InterSystems IRIS shortly (i.e. difference in supported platforms), but please don't consider this as merely an upgrade. You may already have noticed the installer doesn't support upgrading anyhow.

Thanks,
benjamin 

Hi Robert,

DocBook has now moved fully online, which is what the mgmt portal will link to: http://docs.intersystems.com/iris

SAMPLES included quite a few outdated examples and was also not appropriate for many non-dev deployments, so we've also moved to a different model there, posting the most relevant ones on GitHub, giving us more flexibility to provide updates and new ones: https://github.com/intersystems?q=samples

JDBC driver: to what extent is this different from the past? It's always just been available as a jarfile, as is customary for JDBC drivers. We do hope to be able to post it through Maven repositories in the near future though.

Small icons: yeah, to make our installer and (more importantly) the container images more lightweight, we had to economize on space. Next to the removal of DocBook and Samples, using smaller icons also reduces the size in bytes ;) ;)

InterSystems IRIS is giving us the opportunity to adopt a contemporary deployment model, where we were somewhat restricted by long-term backwards compatibility commitments with Caché & Ensemble. Some of these will indeed catch your eye and might even feel a little strange at first, but we really believe the new model makes developing and deploying applications easier and faster. Of course, we're open to feedback on all of these evolution and this is a good channel to hear from you.

Thanks!
benjamin

iKnow was written to analyze English rather than ObjectScript, so you may see a few odd results coming out of code blocks. I believe you can add a where clause excluding those records from the block table to avoid them.

I've had something simple running on my laptop already a long time ago, but the internal discussion on how to package it proved a little more complicated. Among other things, an iFind index requires an iKnow-enabled license (and more space!), which meant you couldn't simply include it in every kit.

Also, for the ranking of docbook results, applying proper weights based on the type of content (title / paragraph / sample / ...) was at least as important as the text search capabilities themselves. That latter piece has been well-addressed in 2017.1, so docbook search is in pretty good shape now. Blending in an easily-deployable iFind option as Konstantin published can only add to this!

Thanks,
benjamin

Hi Konstantin,

thanks for sharing your work, a nice application of iFind technology! If I can add a few ideas to make this more lightweight:

• Rather than creating a domain programmatically, the recommended approach for a few versions now has been to use Domain Definitions. They allow you to declare a domain in an XML format (not much unlike the %Installer approach) and avoid a number of inconveniences in managing your domain in a reproducible way.
• From reading the article, I believe you're just using the iKnow domain for that one EntityAPI:GetSimilar() call to generate search suggestions. iFind has a similar feature, also exposed through SQL, through %iFind.FindEntities() and %iFind.FindWords(), depending on what kind of results you're looking for. See also this iFind demo. With that in place, you may even be able to skip those domains altogether :-)

thanks,
benjamin

Hi Robert,

glad you liked Paul's announcement. Global Summit attendees can pre-register for the limited release program in the Tech Exchange area, at the central booths. After the summit, we'll gradually broaden that program and publish a Field Test closer to the end of this calendar year.

You can find a lot more about the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform on our new website and through this resource guide at learning.intersystems.com. Stay tuned for more articles on the various new features here too.

Thanks,
benjamin

Hi Eduard,

you can define iFind indices for calculated fields, so if you point your field calculation to a function that strips out the HTML, you should be fine. The HTML converter in iKnow was built for a slightly different purpose, but can be used here:

Property HtmlText As %String(MAXLEN="");

Property PlainText As %String(MAXLEN="") [ Calculated, ReadOnly, SqlComputed, SqlComputeCode = { set {PlainText} = ##class(%iKnow.Source.Converter.Html).StripTags({HtmlText}) } ];

Regards,
benjamin

Hi Evgeny,

nice work!

Maybe you can enhance the interface by also including an iKnow-based KPI to the dashboard exposing the similar or related entities for the concept clicked in the heat map. You can subclass this generic KPI and specify the query you want it to invoke, and then use it as the data source for a table widget. Let me know if I can help.

thanks,
benjamin

Cool stuff!

I believe you're using matching dictionaries for identifying those sentiment markers, which is indeed convenient from an API perspective. However, you might want to take advantage of sentiment attributes, which will allow you to not just detect occurrences of your marker terms, but also which parts of the sentence they apply to. I'm not sure how that is covered in your current app (didn't dig that deep into the code), but especially in the recent versions that improved our attribute expansion accuracy, it may improve the precision of your application too. See this article for more details.

Separately, leveraging domain definitions may also simplify the methods you're using to set up your domain. There's an option to load dictionary content from a table or file, leveraging <external> tags inside the <matching> section. It's not (yet) supported through the Architect, but you can add it when updating the class through Studio.

Thanks for sharing this!

benjamin