InterSystems Announces Winner of Globals Challenge For Application Developers

InterSystems Corporation, a worldwide leader in advanced database, integration and analytics technologies, today announced the winner of its latest Globals Challenge application developer contest.

InterSystems created the series of Globals Challenges to encourage experimentation and innovation using the InterSystems Globals free database system. Available from http://globalsdb.org/, Globals provides extremely fast performance and massive scalability, and excels in low latency, high volume data ingestion. It is the proven technology at the core of the many thousands of applications around the world that have been built on the InterSystems CACHÉ database. Globals is highly flexible, featuring easy-to-use APIs that offer a rich approach to data modeling on which different access patterns can be created. Currently available with Java and Node.js, and with other APIs planned for release, Globals requires minimal computing resources and requires a very small learning curve.

The Challenges provide the opportunity for individual and small teams of developers to showcase to their peers how they can reinvent application information management, when free of the constraints of pre-defined schemas and general purpose data paradigms. “The IT industry is at a tipping point in the areas of capturing, processing, storing, and retrieving data,” said Robert Nagle, InterSystems Vice President of Software Development. “New scales of volume and types of data from a myriad of sources are popularizing terms and concepts such as ‘Big Data.’ In addition,” he continued, “personal mobility and consumerization are leading developers to challenge antiquated relational database implementations while the growing community of NoSQL partisans are rallying around innovative Not Only Relational approaches. The Globals Challenges provide an optimal venue for development creativity and experimentation along with a significant financial incentive for participation.”

Anton Lee, an application developer at Siberian Integration Systems (SIS) in Russia, won the latest $3,500 contest prize with his application that enables users to track clickstream activity on any Web page. Created in less than 48 hours, Lee’s Clickstream Monitor includes an object to Globals mapping framework for loading and saving data that includes indices to enable rapid searches and a graphical statistics page to view search results.

Lee is the second developer to win an InterSystems Globals Challenge. William Cheung won the very first Globals Challenge contest, which required developers to use Globals to build a representative class to model the RSS feed from the popular Flickr.com photo sharing website, to populate the Globals database with data from the RSS feed, and to build a search mechanism to query the data elements populated in the database. Cheung is on contract to iRise, a provider of enterprise visualization software for business applications. And, while he never worked with Globals prior to submitting his contest-winning entry, he said he’d certainly consider using the technology for future development projects.

InterSystems is also calling for developers to seed the Globals community with ideas for future Challenges, and to shape the agenda for new Globals APIs. “The Node.js API is a good example of what community pioneers have achieved using Globals,” according to Nagle. “It provides new persistence options for Node.js applications without compromising scalability and consistency. The submission conditions of the Challenges require that winning applications be donated to the Globals community, so, over time, we think that the GlobalsDb.org forums will offer inspiration and practical code examples to community newbies.”

“The award-winning Clickstream Monitor is a good example of the creative approaches to application development that are possible with the InterSystems Globals database,” Nagle said. “As more and more developers join our Globals community, they’re learning the benefits of our unique, proven, free approach to data management on massive scales. And, we hope that the Globals Challenge will help build broader awareness of the proven technology that is the core of all InterSystems products.”

About InterSystems

InterSystems Corporation is a global software leader with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and offices in 23 countries. InterSystems provides advanced technologies for breakthrough applications. InterSystems CACHÉ® is a high performance object database that makes applications faster and more scalable. InterSystems Ensemble® is a platform for rapid integration and the development of connectable applications. InterSystems HealthShare™ is a strategic platform for healthcare informatics, and the creation of an Electronic Health Record on a regional or national scale. InterSystems DeepSee™ is software that makes it possible to embed real-time analytics capabilities in transactional applications.

InterSystems Globals is a fast, proven, simple, flexible and free database available from GlobalsDb.org.

For more information, visit InterSystems.com and www.youtube.com/InterSystemsCorp. And, please join the InterSystems community at www.facebook.com/InterSystems or @InterSystems on Twitter.