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Best Practices for Production Development

This topic is a general overview that prepares team members to work on production projects. It outlines development tasks and identifies sources of information about InterSystems IRIS® data platform and about enterprise integration. The information pertains to all types of production projects.

Project Goals

The goal of any production development project is to connect two or more systems. A production is a specialized package of software and documentation that solves a specific integration problem for an enterprise customer. For an overview, see Introducing Interoperability Productions.

This section describes InterSystems IRIS in terms of the software elements that application developers must create and configure in order to deliver a solution. Project Delivery summarizes the sequence and outcome of an InterSystems IRIS development project.

Project Delivery

The InterSystems IRIS product architecture supports various styles of delivery to the enterprise:

  • A production might comprise the entire integration solution for an enterprise, or the production can fit into existing solutions — or partial solutions — that are already in place at the enterprise.

  • A production can replace, upgrade, or add new features to a legacy system as needed, without requiring any part of the legacy system to be removed or changed.

  • InterSystems IRIS supports incremental development projects, so a development team can choose to advance the boundary between old and new systems as rapidly or as slowly as the enterprise requires.

Many InterSystems IRIS development projects follow a phase sequence similar to this one:

Order Phase Goal Focus
1 Specification Specify the requirements for the production. What must the production be able to do?
2 Design Design the production software. How must the elements interact?
3 Coding Build the production software. Are additional elements needed?
4 Test Test the production software. Does the production satisfy the requirements that you specified?
5 Deployment Install the software in its target location. Are you prepared to test, design, create, and rework as needed?
6 Release Deliver software and project artifacts. What will be useful to the system administration team?

Documentation

It is a fundamental best practice to read the InterSystems IRIS documentation. Your best starting points are the following items. Each provides further cross-references:

It is also important to understand the platform features of InterSystems IRIS that support productions. A useful starting point is the Orientation Guide for Server-Side Programming.

Helpful background materials include the following:

Other useful development guides include:

Language reference materials include:

For information about system utilities and security, consult the following documents:

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