15. Writing ObjectScript in VS Code

Speaker 0 00:00:02 Welcome Speaker 1 00:00:02 To data points, a podcast by InterSystems learning services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast. App links can be [email protected]. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, you'll hear an interview between Zach Crowell and Raj Singh about the object script, extension and visuals, Speaker 0 00:00:24 Your coat. Speaker 1 00:00:39 Welcome to episode 15 of data points by InterSystems learning services. If you caught our last episode, you heard about the experience labs that we held during virtual summit. If any of those caught your interest beyond the lookout, we're converting those labs into exercises that will be available in our learning catalog. So you can head over to learning.intersystems.com to check it out. In today's episode. My colleague Zach CRO Aquil interview product manager, Raj Singh, Raj is a product manager for the developer experience here at InterSystems. And one topic that falls squarely into that area is the optic script extension for visual studio code. This extension allows developers to work seamlessly in a familiar free and lightweight IDE like vs code. So without further ado, here's Zack's interview with Raj, Speaker 0 00:01:27 Right? Raj thing, Speaker 2 00:01:28 Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so let's get started. So could you start by talking a little bit about how this project, um, evolved from an open source project, uh, with Dimitri to a community collaboration with InterSystems? Yeah, so it was, um, this is pretty much a new process for InterSystems. We've dipped our toes in the water earlier in 2019 with some open source releases around. I know, um, and some other smaller things, less visible, but tackling, uh, an IDE, which is something, you know, uh, all of our developers touch almost every day, if not multiple times a day, it was a big commitment, a lot of, uh, a lot went into that decision, but that was partly mitigated by the fact that, uh, the, the, the object script extension that Demetrius has Lennar Coff had already had already launched, had already shown a lot of popularity. Speaker 2 00:02:30 There was, uh, hundreds of installs. Um, people were using it every day. So from that perspective, it wasn't too scary. Um, but just from a process perspective, we bank our reputation on Sterling customer support and reliability. And so that those kinds of things are easier to achieve when you have more control. So going to embracing open source introduced a lot of, uh, degrees of freedom that we didn't know if we could be comfortable with. So we went into this, you know, with a good amount of research that showed that visual studio code was a really solid platform. Very popular developers were coming to it in droves first, first development platform to, to garner over 50% usage rate across the whole developer ecosystem that I've ever seen in years and decades, probably. So there are a lot of strong signs pointing to visual studio code, being a terrific platform to build upon. And then we had some of those signals that the objects are to extension that Dimitri had created was also a good place for us to start. And, but, so we went into the spring with the decision to try this out and we would see how it would go in terms of our culture fitting in with the, with the community culture and having that, having that collaboration process work well, we do, you can't know until you try it out. Speaker 3 00:04:03 Wow. That's great. Thank you. Um, and yeah, you mentioned support a little bit there and how this presents a unique opportunity and challenge for supporting a product because it is open source. Could you talk a little bit more about that and how, how getting support for this extension works? Yeah. And this Speaker 2 00:04:17 Will be a bit confusing for us and probably a little confusing for customers, at least at first, but this there's going to be a new model for this. First of all, um, for those of you who may be long-term customers, you can always do what you've always done. Talk to your call into WIC, talk to your favorite rep and, you know, really get help through whatever problems you're having. But we'd also like you to consider first going to get hub issues and starting, you're starting your support journey there. First of all, because if, if you're having a problem, somebody else probably is having the same problem. So you can probably get a lot of insight just immediately in the middle of the night, whatever you might even solve it on your own. Uh, secondly, you know, if you're having a problem, somebody else, even if they haven't reported an issue is probably having the problem today or might have it in a month and you can pay it forward and help somebody else out down the road by, you know, keeping your, keeping your journey around, fixing your issue, um, in the public. So that is a lot of reasons why, uh, we should start with GitHub issues whenever you, whenever you have a problem, you definitely want to put enhancement requests on get hub issues, because that is where they're going to be triaged. This is a community community project in the open completely. And so the project management committee, which is going to review all the enhancement requests and figure out whether, or to work on them, uh, that's all gonna happen in the open and only things that are on get hub issues are going to be considered. Speaker 3 00:06:04 Right. Thank you. So you go to get hub to both add, um, put support requests and also provide your feedback and that's all through the same streamlined approach. Speaker 2 00:06:15 Yeah. For those of you who are get hub veterans, you'll, you'll get that pretty easily, but for those of you who are new to it, it may be a, feel a little bit foreign at first, but it should quickly, you should quickly get comfortable with it. So issues are just kind of a place issues. And maybe as a mist, a little bit of a misnomer, it's a place to start a discussion on a particular topic. And then as that topic evolves, it could be co it could go from a bug report to an enhancement request if you filed it wrong in the first place, um, or it could go the other way. The important thing is that if there's something you, if there's some friction in your experience, if there's some problem you're having or something you just want to say is, is great. You always go to a single place, get hub issues. Right. Speaker 3 00:07:04 Thank you for that. And yeah, I know you also mentioned before that you can actually access that the link to the get hub, right. From vs code, if you just go to the extensions page. Um, so could you talk a little bit, I'm curious a lot about the different elements of the extension or really extensions. Now, I think there is now for like four extensions that are part of a bundle. Um, the, in particular I'm interested in the, the language server. Could you talk a little bit more about that? What's the language server's role in, in the, this object stricted extension bundle? Speaker 2 00:07:35 Yeah, so the language server is really what differentiates this from what it was six months ago. Uh, the language server is a little piece of software that sits on your computer on the same computer as, uh, visual studio code itself. But it's a separate, separate executable. It's a separate little process running and it mediates communication between your IDE and your Iris or cache server. And what it's doing is as you type every single character, you type it's going and figuring out on the backend in the database, whether there's some information it can provide to make your coding experience better. So what we see, what that means is that if you want to do code completion, variable completion, um, get some documentation on a built-in class or one that you've one that you've written yourself, and I've already compiled to the server. All that rich information comes through the language server, constantly being in communication with the server and knowing the whole class, the whole code base that's already in the server and how basically the language interacts with the database. Speaker 2 00:08:52 So the language server is otherwise you would have to have all the smarts right in the extension. And a first reason why that doesn't work well is that, um, we can't ship your code inside the extension, so that wouldn't work well. And B it's just, it's not an extensible way to do things. It would create a huge, a huge extension for you to work with. And it would, uh, it would have to be versioned for, it would have to be specific for every database version. So having a language server allows us to do amazing syntax coloring. Um, it allows us to allows us to have your coding experience tailored directly to whatever version of virus or cachet you're using. So whatever classes exist on that instance of the server will be exposed to your programming environment through the language server. And it in the future will allow you to even have languages within languages within languages colored perfectly. So if you're writing SQL inside an object script routine, that will be, those will be colored separately. You might be writing, you know, a Python routine inside of an object script class that will, the Python will be colored with Python, syntax, the object script, a lot P object script. All those things will be mediated through the language server. Speaker 3 00:10:20 Wow. That sounds like it's going to be a massive boost to productivity and just making, making your experience as a developer so much smoother. And so far as you can just see the whole code base that you're working with. Um, and all of those, like nested syntax, um, kind of, um, colorings as you were talking about. Um, so, um, I'm curious, you know, you about a couple things, first of all, like if I'm coming from, you know, the days of Italia, um, can I still use Italia? Is that, or is it tell you being deprecated? Speaker 2 00:10:51 The tele is definitely being deprecated or sunset. It really, you know, it's, uh, it's B as code already does more than you can do at the tele A's. So there really is no reason for a tele users to go to stay on that platform. It's quickly. I w the, the vs code environment has been so successful. We've surpassed the Teles functionality sooner than we expected. And so the, the official message is definitely, if you have been using a tele EA it's time to move, it's time to migrate as quickly as possible. And, uh, and we've been giving that message to people who have asked, and we haven't had any pushback. So people who have tried out both are so happy to move on from that. Speaker 3 00:11:37 Right. And I can say just as a user myself, the, the difference between the challenges of even just installing a tele, uh, on my version of eclipse versus vs code it's night and day getting BS code up and running, and my ID was, you know, matter of the two buttons. And it was, um, now on the other side of things, what about studio? Is that going to be sticking around Speaker 2 00:11:59 Duty? We'll definitely be sticking around for, for a very long time. Um, there are studio, first of all, studio just does things that the vs code objects surface extension doesn't do, and may never do all the low code editors for the inter-operability slash ensemble, um, products, um, just don't exist on visual studio code. Yet, there are a lot of wizards in studio that people have grown very used to which the vs code platform just works on a different metaphor. So I don't even know if we can bring, we definitely can't bring them in the same form to vs code. We may be able to replicate them in the, in the model that vs code likes a little bit, and we'll continue to do that with code templates and things like that, but they're going to be different platforms for the foreseeable future, and they're going to have different strengths and weaknesses. And I think people who have grown accustomed to studio will continue to use it for certain things. And they'll probably end up in a mixed environment where I expect over the next couple of years, more and more, more and more mainstream objects, script development will probably be on vs code and studio will still be there for custom, you know, little, I don't want to say esoteric, but some more special purpose, um, needs, Speaker 3 00:13:23 Right. So if you're working with wizards or some of those more kind of, um, as you said, um, kind of, um, obscure needs that, that, um, two U offers that's the way to go, but for your, your, your development work and your, your, your kind of regular coding, um, viscose kind of do everything you needed to do. Um, so one thing I, I, I was excited to be watching a star was the, kind of the gradual release of the product. Uh, I remember getting to around, uh, version 0.9, uh, which, um, you seem to be like, have all the functionality. Uh, and then, uh, that was, I think, early September, before version 1.0, came out in October. Could you talk a little bit about what, what changed between those? Speaker 2 00:14:06 Um, well, the big change was the language server and which I had just talked about that was that that took the product from kind of a toy to being a real production quality thing. And I don't want to denigrate it too much, it's it wasn't a toy, but the syntax coloring wasn't perfect. There were things that weren't colored, right. Um, there was very little inline documentation, cause like I said, you can't, you don't want to build all the documentation for all the classes available, um, building classes in Iris into the extension. So there are a lot of things that were very limited. So getting the language server in there was the biggest change. And then there was so more testing going from 0.9 to 1.0 throughout the summer, we had, we expanded the user base and InterSystems getting involved in the project, attracted a lot more beta testers to it, gave them the confidence in it that they were willing to devote some time to it. Speaker 2 00:15:08 So I would say the second biggest change from 0.9 to 1.0 is hardening the whole thing, having many more eyes on the, on the product and tons of bug fixes and little tweaks and enhancements. And then the third big thing is the introduction of the server manager extension, which lets you, we changed the idea of how you configure, um, your access to service in 0.9. In previous versions, you pretty much had one server that you could access. And if you wanted to access, see, you only had one server per project, you could access. If you wanted to access a different server, start another project. 1.0, allows you to have multiple servers, multiple Iris servers or cache servers hooked up to the same project and also allow you to use server side source control instead of only client side source control. So a host of new features, I would group them all under moving into the enterprise level, um, feature set. And so it's definitely, it works the same. Most of it works exactly the same as 0.9, but it's much deeper and it'll take you a lot further. You won't, you won't max out on your ability to do your projects. Speaker 3 00:16:28 Great. Yeah. There's so many things I've experienced there, but there's still, you know, the things you're describing. I still excited to dig deeper in and try some of that out. So, um, Speaker 2 00:16:37 Oh, I forgot the big one big one, which is encrypted password storage prior to 1.0, you couldn't store, you couldn't store your password encrypted. You could only use it for development environments. Cause you either had to store that password in plain text for your server, for your database server or you had to type it in every time you connect it to the right pain. Speaker 3 00:16:57 Yeah. That's a, that's a big one. Um, yeah, so what's, what's next for vs code, uh, object script. What's the future hold? Speaker 2 00:17:06 Well, I think this winner is going to be less big splashy features and more making it rock solid. We're going to, I think with 1.0, coming out that will attract a lot more users to the product. And when you get a lot more people, you'll, you'll find some of the dark corners, some things that don't work as well. So we'll spend a lot of time making it solid and dependable. And then we're going to begin to look at, uh, some small new features and some big new features. Somebody we're talking to this week during the virtual summit or annual user conference brought up the brought up the issue of refactoring code refactoring, which I think is a must have. It's one of my favorite features of an IDE, which decades ago when I started being a programmer, um, got me off at text editors and to use a real ID is the idea that you can change a variable name, that the ID would allow you to change a variable name and it would change it everywhere. Speaker 2 00:18:07 It appeared in your project or change a class method signature and change it everywhere. It appeared in your product, in your project. Uh, those kinds of mass refactoring things are huge productivity boosts. So we need to get more of that in there. I think we're going to greatly expand the number of code snippets, which is vs codes term for templating out, um, boilerplate code. So that there's stuff you write all the time. Um, and you don't want to type it in, you know, every time from the most simplest thing like four loops or if then statements to whole class, class signatures. If you're doing a, if you're doing arrest, arrest, um, implementation, there's a bunch of stuff that are as boiler plate that you just need in there all at once. If you're extending a class, there's a bunch of boilerplate stuff. So we'll be taking a close look at what are the most useful things. And once again, jump on, get hub issues and, and request your favorite, your favorite boilerplate code templates. And we will work on building as much of those as we can. Speaker 3 00:19:16 Right. Thank you. So, one last question I just wondering about this is an open source project. Does that mean that like if I see a feature, I can theoretically do a pull request and try and develop myself. Um, are you encouraging users to do that as well? If they have the time and motivation? Speaker 2 00:19:33 Yeah, definitely. That would be great. That is the ideal state of any open source project to have a huge thriving developer community. And don't be intimidated there. This is another great thing about the vs code platform over eclipse. You can get into it, you can get into programming for it very easily. So for example, I'm writing the extension is hard. It involves TypeScript programming and understanding the whole code base can be very complicated, but it can be as simple as I mentioned, the boilerplate code, that is something which is done simply through writing a single Jaison file and you can even do it. You can even do user-specific code templates so you can create your own little Jason file, um, that works in vs code without even submitting it to the main open source project for inclusion in, in the, uh, in the whole product. Speaker 2 00:20:31 So, and we have a document available in the get hub repo called contributing dot M D that shows you how to set up your visual studio code environment for development instead of just use. But yeah, it's pretty easy to get started and are steps to get you dip your toes in the water and get you more and more involved in being a code contributor. And then on the governance side, we have a, we've set up a process for accepting those types of contributions and having you become more and more a part of the project, you can get involved as much or as little as you want to be in the development side of this thing. Great. Um, so yeah, the future looks like tightening it up in the short term, uh, making sure that we can kind of address any work cases as they come with any of course, invariably variably with any new technology and then a little further down the line, adding some of those features like code refactoring, um, Roz things. Thank you so much for joining us today. Uh, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. Yeah, thanks. Um, I can't, can't wait to see what people do with this platform, not just from a user perspective, but this is a product for developers and by developers. And I hope to have a lot of developers join us on making you better. Speaker 1 00:21:50 So thanks again to Raj and Zach for having that conversation about vs code. The extension is definitely a great breakthrough for making development on InterSystems technologies, easier and more intuitive. So we encourage you to check that out. If you haven't already that'll do it for episode 15 and we'll see you next time on data points.