Tech News - Web Development

On Monday, Kadir Topal, a Senior Product Manager at Mozilla announced that the new React frontend of MDN Web Docs is now in Beta. MDN Web Docs, formerly known as Mozilla Developer Network, is the one-stop for web developer documentation. Mozilla has been working on replacing the jQuery library with React for months now to provide developers a customized MDN experience while still ensuring faster page loading time. MDN has two modes: editing and viewing. While viewing is used by most developers visiting the site, only a small fraction of them use the editing mode. This is why the team broke these two use cases into different domains. You can access the editing mode on wiki.developer.mozilla.org and the viewing mode on beta.developer.mozilla.org. The team plans to decommission beta.developer.mozilla.org after the testing phase is complete. The editing mode will continue to be served by the old frontend wiki.developer.mozilla.org. The discussion on this decision started earlier this year. While many praised it for this move, many felt that as a promoter of web standards it shouldn’t overlook web components for a custom framework. A developer commented on MDN’s GitHub repository, “As a user, I would like to see Mozilla that uses web standards to promote web standards. As a developer, I would like to see Mozilla and their developers using web standards and promote them. I don't need to see the nth React project.” Another developer commented, “The message that the No. 1 resource for Web development is ditching the same Web technologies it advocates, would be as disastrous as that, implicitly claiming a defeat for the Web, hence seppuku in the long term for the platform nobody would care much anymore.” In its support a developer remarked, “At the end of the day, none of us should care what MDN uses - we should care that the devs who have put so much effort into building a resource that has massively contributed to our own education and will continue to do so on a daily basis are productive and happy.” David Flanagan, one of the developers behind this project, affirmed that this decision was purely pragmatic. Flanagan shared that the MDN team is very tiny and they only had occasional help from volunteer contributions. Choosing React for MDN’s frontend may bring more contributors, he believed. He said, “Fundamentally, I'm asking you all to trust us. We're hoping to do great things this year with MDN, and I think that the vast majority of our users will love what we do. Thank you for reading this far, and thank you for your passion about web standards and MDN.” The team is now seeking developers’ feedback on this release. In case of any issue, you can file a bug, reply on Discourse, or also contact Topal on Twitter. Mozilla announces a subscription-based service for providing ad-free content to users Mozilla launches Firefox Preview, an early version of a GeckoView-based Firefox for Android Mozilla makes Firefox 67 “faster than ever” by deprioritizing least commonly used features

Django 2.1 has been released with changes to Model view permissions, Database backend API, and additional new features. Django 2.1 supports Python 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. Django 2.1 is a time-based release. The schedule followed was: May 14, 2018 Django 2.1 alpha; feature freeze. June 18 Django 2.1 beta; non-release blocking bug fix freeze. July 16 Django 2.1 RC 1; translation string freeze. ~August 1 Django 2.1 final Here is the list of all new features: Model view permission Django 2.1 adds a view permission to the model Meta.default_permissions. This new permission will allow users read-only access to models in the admin. The permission will be created automatically when running migrate. Considerations for the new model view permission With the new “view” permission, existing custom admin forms may raise errors when a user doesn’t have the change permission because the form might access nonexistent fields. If users have a custom permission with a codename of the form can_view_<modelname>, the new view permission handling in the admin will allow view access to the changelist and detail pages for those models. Changes to Database backend API To adhere to PEP 249, exceptions where a database doesn’t support a feature are changed from NotImplementedError to django.db.NotSupportedError. The allow_sliced_subqueries database feature flag is renamed to allow_sliced_subqueries_with_in. The DatabaseOperations.distinct_sql() now requires an additional params argument and returns a tuple of SQL and parameters instead of a SQL string. The DatabaseFeatures.introspected_boolean_field_type is changed from a method to a property. Dropped support for MySQL 5.5 and PostgreSQL 9.3 Django 2.1 marks the end of upstream support for MySQL 5.5. It now supports MySQL 5.6 and higher. Similarly, it ends the support for PostgreSQL 9.3. Django 2.1 supports PostgreSQL 9.4 and higher. SameSite cookies The cookies used for django.contrib.sessions, django.contrib.messages, and Django’s CSRF protection now set the SameSite flag to Lax by default. Browsers that respect this flag won’t send these cookies on cross-origin requests. Other Features It removes BCryptPasswordHasher from the default PASSWORD_HASHERS setting. The minimum supported version of mysqlclient is increased from 1.3.3 to 1.3.7. Support for SQLite < 3.7.15 is removed. The multiple attribute rendered by the SelectMultiple widget now uses HTML5 boolean syntax rather than XHTML’s multiple="multiple". The local-memory cache backend now uses a least-recently-used (LRU) culling strategy rather than a pseudo-random one. The new json_script filter safely outputs a Python object as JSON, wrapped in a <script> tag, ready for use with JavaScript. These are just a select few updates in available in Django 2.1. The release notes cover all the new features in detail. Getting started with Django RESTful Web Services Getting started with Django and Django REST frameworks to build a RESTful app Python web development: Django vs Flask in 2018

Soft skills have been high on the tech agenda for a while now. This was largely down to the stereotypical (and unfair) image of the IT team as quiet, uncommunicative and awkward. But it is also related to broader changes in tech. Today, more people have a stake in software related projects. Product and project managers, even financial managers, will have their work impacted by software. That means everyone's communication around it is so important. This year's Skill Up report clearly highlights that developers are aware of how valuable soft skills really are. A huge 96% of respondents said they believe that developing soft skills is important: The Skill Up 2018 report will be available to download on Monday 4 June. Perhaps this isn't that surprising. We all know how much of a difference effective communication can make on a project. Without good communication, the technical bits of work become even harder. Why soft skills are important to developers working today If we go back to the stereotype of the ring-fenced IT team, it's not hard to see why soft skills are so valued by business leaders and management figures. It's almost as if trainers and consultants and management have conspired, saying 'we need these engineers to be more like us'. But whatever the management industry want from tech pros, it's clear that the real advantage of developing soft skills are for developers themselves. Here are just a few reasons why soft skills are so important for developers: It makes collaboration easier. You can't of course, collaborate if you don't communicate. And in today's Agile-centric software world, clear communication is crucial. When you're working to tight deadlines, being clear about your challenges and problems is vital. Soft skills can change how you focus on problems. Communication changes the way you understand problems. It changes the way they are framed. For example, is the database issue simply a technical issue, or is there a wider point about what the knock on effect for the user will be? There's usually a number of technical solutions, but to select the best one, you often need a frank and clear discussion about the impact different decisions might make. Soft skills open up your career path. When you develop your soft skills you find that you occupy a subtly different role within your team or even within your organization. You become more visible to other people - maybe even more trusted. That can only be a good thing. At a superficial level it's about status; but more importantly it allows you to push forward your own interests. How often have you found your opinions and ideas discounted or ignored? Yes, maybe your ideas were just really bad, but maybe you just didn't quite communicate them properly. Similarly, soft skills are also essential for anyone networking. True, networking is rarely anyone's favorite pastime, but doing it well could do wonders for your future. Also, meeting people is sometimes fun! Good people do exist! It makes work more enjoyable. Work isn't going to be great every day. But anyone who's worked in a job they hate will probably know that communication challenges are often at the root of their dissatisfaction. Of course, sometimes other people are the problem. But if you can keep up your end of the bargain, you've done all you can. And if you can start to help other people develop soft skills then you're well on your way to becoming an important and valuable leader. You learn more when you communicate. This really comes back to collaboration, but it's a little more specific than that. When technology changes so quickly and there are so many options out there - from what you learn to how you learn it - engaging with others can be so important. This might just be about the conversations you have with colleagues. But it's also the wider conversations you take part in within a given community. Perhaps you contribute to a forum, or maybe just like tweeting - either way you're not only playing an important role in the community, you're also pushing your knowledge and understanding forward. The reasons why soft skills are important could be huge. And given 96% of developers believe it to be important, it would seem that no one really needs convincing. However, it is important to see how soft skills impact different parts of your job, and even your life. Yes it's about writing great emails, but it isn't just that. Yes it's about learning how to network at conferences but it's also much more than that. You can't have great technical skill without soft skills The bottom line is that it's hard to be a great technician without soft skills. It's possible, but very rare. Nothing technical happens in a vacuum - technical things are always about people. Forget management speak and training courses: that, really, is the one thing you need to remember. Read next Soft skills every data scientist should teach their child ‘Soft’ Skills Every Data Pro Needs

Last week, the team behind Babel announced the release of Babel 7.5.0. This release ships with improved support for a few ECMAScript proposals including the F# variant of the Stage 1 pipeline operator and an official plugin for the Stage 4 dynamic import() proposal. It also comes with an experimental TypeScript namespaces support. Following are some of the highlights from Babel 7.5.0: F# pipeline operator The pipeline operator proposal introduces a syntactic sugar (|>) for greater readability when chaining several functions together. This operator is similar to F#, OCaml, Elixir, Elm, Julia, Hack, and LiveScript, as well as UNIX pipes. Starting from the 7.0.0-beta release, Babel had the “minimal” variant of the pipeline operator proposal. Then came the “Smart” variant in Babel 7.3.0 and with this release we have the F# variant. The difference between the smart and F# variant is that the latter uses the concept of arrow functions instead of "topic references" (#). “This has the advantage of being more similar to current JavaScript, at the cost of a slightly less concise syntax,” the team explained as the advantage for this change. You can test this new variant by adding ‘@babel/plugin-proposal-pipeline-operator’ to your Babel configuration. You can also try it out in the REPL by enabling the "Stage 1" preset. Dynamic import transform Though Babel has support for parsing dynamic imports, it does not provide a consistent way to transform them. It allows parsing import(foo), but asks developers to use webpack or ‘babel-plugin-dynamic-import-node’ to transpile it. To solve this problem, Babel 7.5.0 introduces the ‘@babel/plugin-proposal-dynamic-import’ plugin, which you can use alongside one of the module transform plugins. Experimental TypeScript namespaces support When TypeScript support initially came to Babel, it did not include namespaces as they require type information that can only be provided by a full TypeScript compiler and type-checker. Starting from Babel 7.5.0, you can enable experimental support for namespaces in the TypeScript plugin using the ‘allowNamespaces’ option of ‘@babel/plugin-transform-typescript’. However, there are some limitations in this experimental support that you need to keep in mind: one, namespaces can only export immutable bindings and second, when merging multiple namespaces with the same name, their scope isn't shared. These were some of the updates in Babel 7.5.0. To know more in detail check out the official announcement and also the release notes. Babel 7 released with Typescript and JSX fragment support How to create a native mobile app with React Native [Tutorial] Meteor 1.8 addresses technical debt of 1.7 with delayed legacy builds, upgraded to Babel 7, Mongo 4

The GitHub team released a new Go library, Vulcanizer, that interacts with an Elasticsearch cluster, yesterday. Vulcanizer is not a full-fledged Elasticsearch client. However, it is aimed at providing a high-level API to help with common tasks associated with operating an Elasticsearch cluster. These tasks include querying health status of the cluster, migrating data from nodes, updating cluster settings, and more. GitHub makes use of Elasticsearch as the core technology behind its search services. GitHub has already released the Elastomer library for Ruby and they use Elastic library for Go by user olivere. However, the GitHub team wanted a high-level API that corresponded with the common operations on cluster such as disabling allocation or draining the shards from a node. They wanted a library that focused more on the administrative operations and that could be easily used by their existing tooling. Since Go’s structure encourages the construction of composable software, they decided it was a good fit for Elasticsearch. This is because, Elasticsearch is very effective and helps carry out almost all the operations that can be done using its HTTP interface, and where you don’t want to write JSON manually. Vulcanizer is great at getting nodes of a cluster, updating the max recovery cluster settings, and safely adding or removing the nodes from the exclude settings, making sure that shards don’t unexpectedly allocate onto a node. Also, Vulcanizer helps build ChatOps tooling around Elasticsearch quickly for common tasks. GitHub team states that having all the Elasticsearch functionality in their own library, Vulcanizer, helps its internal apps to be slim and isolated. For more information, check out the official GitHub Vulcanizer post. GitHub increases its reward payout model for its bug bounty program   GitHub launches draft pull requests GitHub Octoverse: top machine learning packages, languages, and projects of 2018

Yesterday, Kamil Mielnik, a JavaScript Developer who specializes in React technology stack, introduced a new automated refactoring tool for React and Redux called R-Factor. Just like C# and Java programmers, who are spoiled with a variety of refactoring tools, JavaScript developers can use this tool to save their time. With this refactoring tool, React developers will not have to spend time writing very common code manipulations. R-Factor does not break your code, keeps your formatting, and can refactor a file in a reasonable amount of time. It comes with a set of 20 automated refactorings. Out of this 20 automated refactorings, 10 are for React components, 8 are for Redux, and the remaining two are other refactorings. It also provides 16 configuration options, using which you can match your code formatting, naming, and other preferences. Though the initial goal of this tool was to only cover React and Redux refactoring, in the future, we could see some features going beyond React and Redux. Following are some of the refactorings that are introduced: Add className: This will add the className prop to a component and apply it to its root JSX element. Convert SVG to component: With this refactoring, you can convert an SVG into a React component. Convert to arrow component: This will turn a component into a functional component defined as an arrow function. Convert to function component: You can convert a component to a functional component defined as a function. Connect: This connects a component to the Redux store with both mapStateToProps & mapDispatchToProps generated. This refactoring tool is supported on Windows, Linux, and macOS and the supported editors include Atom, Sublime Text 3, and VSCode. For using the R-Factor tool, you need to buy the license key. Before you actually start using it on your project, you can try the R-Factor tool online. To know more in detail, check out the official website of R-Factor. React Native 0.59 RC0 is now out with React Hooks, and more Reactive programming in Swift with RxSwift and RxCocoa [Tutorial] React 16.8 releases with the stable implementation of Hooks

The Node.js team have announced new updates about their August 2018 releases. Per their blog, new versions for each of their supported lines will be released on, or shortly after, the 15th of August, 2018. These releases will address flaws of low severity mostly incorporating a number of security fixes and an upgraded version of OpenSSL. However, the Node.js 10 Current release will not be limited to only security-related updates, as per policy for non-LTS release lines. The releases will also include disclosure of details of the flaws addressed, allowing users to assess the severity of the impact on their own applications. Upgrades to OpenSSL There are two new upgrades to OpenSSL. OpenSSL 1.1.0i and 1.0.2p will be made available on the 14th of August, 2018. These releases will cover three low severity security fixes. Out of these three, two releases are relevant to Node.js users. Client DoS due to large DH parameter: During key agreement in a TLS handshake using a DH(E) based ciphersuite, a malicious server can send a very large prime value to the client. This will cause the client to spend an unreasonably long period of time generating a key, resulting in a hang until the client has finished. This could be exploited in a Denial Of Service attack. ECDSA key extraction via local side-channel: The OpenSSL RSA Key generation algorithm is vulnerable to a cache timing side channel attack. An attacker with sufficient access to mount cache timing attacks during the RSA key generation process could recover the private key. All versions of Node.js 6.x (LTS "Boron") and 8.x (LTS "Carbon") are impacted via OpenSSL 1.0.2. OpenSSL 1.1.0 impacts all versions of Node.js 10.x (Current). All OpenSSL fixes are available on the OpenSSL git repository. Security inclusions in Node.js Apart from OpenSSL upgrades, the August 2018 upgrades also feature security inclusions: Unintentional exposure of uninitialized memory Out of bounds (OOB) write All actively supported release lines of Node.js are impacted by these flaws. Additional inclusions In addition to OpenSSL and security upgrades, the following items are also included for LTS release lines: In inspector the bind address is changed from 0.0.0.0 to 127.0.0.1 so that the bind address can be overridden by the user. This upgrade impacts Node.js 6.x (LTS "Boron") only. In test, keys/Makefile, are updated to clean and build all. This upgrade impacts the test suite for all actively supported release lines of Node.js. The announcement can be read at the Node.js Blog. You can also have a look at the current security policy. Node 10.0.0 released, packed with exciting new features Deploying Node apps on Google App Engine is now easy How is Node.js Changing Web Development?

Last week, Anthony Gore, a Vue Community Partner shared what he calls a "knowledge map" capturing the key areas of professional Vue.js development. This map lists key areas you should target if you are planning to develop Vue apps in 2019. The following diagram shows the developer map: Source: Vue.js Developers Basics of JavaScript and web development Vue.js is an open-source JavaScript framework, which is used for building user interfaces. As it is a JavaScript framework, developers need to have a basic understanding of JavaScript and also of web development. Essential concepts New Vue developers should first focus on the following concepts: Core features: To begin with, you will need to know how to install Vue in a web page and understand the lifecycle of a Vue instance. Also, learn key features of the core such as reactive data, directives, and interpolations. Components: Components are reusable and isolated UI elements. Learn how to declare components and communicate between them through props and events. To build robust and scalable applications you need to learn how to compose with components. Single-page applications (SPAs): In the SPA architecture a single web page acts like a traditional multi-page website. After creating the "pages" as components, you can map them to a unique path with Vue Router, a tool for building SPAs. State management: As your app grows, managing global state becomes difficult and components become bloated with props and event listeners. A design pattern called Flux keeps your data in a predictable and stable central store. The Vuex library helps you implement the Flux architecture in your app. Building real-world Vue apps The concepts in the previous part guide you in building apps that are high performing and efficient, but on the local server. To make your apps production ready you need to learn the following concepts: Project scaffolding: As you start building frequently in Vue, you will have to do the similar configurations and setups in many projects. To make this process easier, we have a tool called Vue CLI for quickly scaffolding single page applications. Full-stack/authenticated apps: Often apps in production will have data-driven user interfaces and the data will be sourced from a secure API. These API will be made with Node, Laravel, Rails, Django or some other server framework. So, you should also learn the common design patterns used to integrate Vue into a full-stack configuration. Testing: If you want your apps to be both maintainable and stable, you need to provide tests. For testing, you can utilize a tool called Vue Test Utils that enables you to create and run tests on isolated components. Optimization: Once your app is deployed on a remote server, it will not have the same speed and efficiency that it showed while testing. You need to optimize the app by using a variety of techniques including server-side rendering, async components, and render functions. Commonly used tools Senior developers should be familiar with the key tools that will be part of almost every Vue-based project. Some of these tools are: Modern JavaScript and Babel: To take advantage of new browser capabilities, you can build your apps using the latest JavaScript standard, ES2015, and proposed features from ES2016 and beyond. For supporting older browsers, you can use the tool named Babel. Its function is to transpile (translate and compile) your modern features into standard features. Webpack: If your code is written across different modules, you can use Webpack to build them into a single file that is readable by a browser. It also works as a build pipeline, allowing you to transform code before it is built and can also be used to optimize your app with a series of plugins. TypeScript: As reported in October, Vue 3 will be written entirely in TypeScript. This implies that to contribute and understand inner workings of Vue you will need to understand TypeScript as well. Important frameworks Many frameworks are available to automate common tasks and save time. Some of the most widely used and important ones are: Nuxt.js: This framework provides various cutting-edge features like component-based routing, server-side rendering, and code splitting out-of-the-box. Vuetify: It is a material framework for Vue, which is based on Google’s Material Design Spec. Vuetify provides an easy-to-remember semantic design to quickly build Vue apps with Material Design layout and styling. NativeScript-Vue: If you want to use Vue for native mobile interfaces, you can do so with the NativeScript-Vue framework. NativeScript is a JavaScript framework for building apps using native user interface components on iOS and Android. NativeScript-Vue is built on top of NativeScript, providing use of Vue syntax and components. After learning all these concepts and tools, you can develop plugins, learn about animations, or more advanced concepts like progressive web apps (PWAs). To know more in detail about the Vue knowledge map, check out Mr. Gore’s post. Introducing Vue Native for building native mobile apps with Vue.js React vs. Vue.js: JavaScript framework wars Evan You shares Vue.js 3.0 updates at VueConf Toronto 2018

The latest version, 8.0 of Redbird got released last month. It is a modern reverse proxy for node. Redbird comes with built in Cluster, HTTP2, LetsEncrypt and Docker support which helps in the handling of load balancing, dynamic virtual hosts, proxying web sockets and SSL encryption. It comes with a complete library for building dynamic reverse proxies with the speed and robustness of http-proxy. It is a light-weight package that includes everything that is needed for easy reverse routing of applications. It is useful for routing applications from different domains in one single host. It is also used for easy handling of SSL. What’s new in Redbird? Support for HTTP2: One can now enable HTTP2 easily by setting the HTTP2 flag to true. Note: HTTP2 requires SSL/TLS certificates. Support for LetsEncrypt: Redbird now supports automatic generation of SSL certificates using LetsEncrypt. While using LetsEncrypt, the obtained certificates will be copied to the specific path on disk. One should take the backup, or save them. Features  It provides flexible and easy routing It also supports websockets The users can experience seamless SSL Support. It also, automatically redirects the user from HTTP to HTTPS It enables automatic TLS certificates generation and renewal It supports load balancing after following a round-robin algorithm It helps in registering and unregistering routes programmatically without restart which allows zero downtime deployments It helps in the automatic registration of running containers by enabling docker support. It enables automatic multi-process with the help of cluster support It is based on top of rock-solid node-http-proxy. It also offers optional logging which is based on bunyan It uses node-etcd to create proxy records automatically from an etcd cluster. Cluster Support in Redbird Redbird supports automatic generation of node cluster. To use the cluster support feature one needs to specify the number of processes that one wants it to use. Redbird automatically restarts any thread that crashes and hence increases reliability. If one needs NTLM support, Redbird adds the required header handler. This then registers a response handler. This handler makes sure that the NTLM auth header is properly split into two entries from http-proxy. Custom resolvers in Redbird Redbird comes with custom resolvers that helps one to decide how the proxy server handles the request. Custom resolvers help in path-based routing, headers based routing and wildcard domain routing. The install command for Redbird is npm install redbird. To read more about this news, check out the official page of Github. Squid Proxy Server: debugging problems How to Configure Squid Proxy Server Squid Proxy Server: Fine Tuning to Achieve Better Performance  

Mojolicious, a next generation web framework for the Perl programming language announced its upgrade to the latest 8.0 version. Mojolicious 8.0 was announced at the Mojoconf in Norway held from 6th to 7th September 2018. This release is codenamed as ‘Supervillain’ and is by far the major release in Mojolicious. Mojolicious allows users to easily grow single file prototypes into well-structured MVC web applications. It is a powerful web development toolkit, that one can use for all kinds of applications, independently of the web framework. Many companies such as Alibaba Group, IBM, Logitech, Mozilla, and others rely on Mojolicious to develop new code bases. Even companies like Bugzilla are getting themselves ported to Mojolicious. The Mojolicious community has decided to make a few organizational changes, to support the continuous growth. This includes: All new development will be consolidated in a single GitHub organization. Mojolicious’ official IRC channel named say hi! that has almost 200 regulars will be moving to Freenode (#mojo on irc.freenode.net). This will make it easier for people not yet part of the Perl community to get involved. Some highlights of the Mojolicious 8.0 Promises/A+ Mojolicious 8.0 includes Promises/A+, a new module and pattern for working with event loops. A promise represents the eventual result of an asynchronous operation. Roles and subprocess The version 8.0 now includes roles, a new way to extend Mojo classes. Also, the subprocesses can now mix event loops and computationally expensive tasks. Placeholder types and Mojo::File With the placeholder types, one can avoid repetitive routes. Whereas the Mojo::File, is the brand new module for dealing with file systems. Cpanel::JSON::XS and Mojo::PG With the Cpanel::JSON::XS, users can process JSON at a much faster rate now. The Mojo::PG includes many new SQL::Abstract extensions for Postgres features. To know more about Mojolicious 8.0 in detail, visit its GitHub page. Warp: Rust’s new web framework for implementing WAI (Web Application Interface) What’s new in Vapor 3, the popular Swift based web framework Beating jQuery: Making a Web Framework Worth its Weight in Code

Yesterday, Chris Beard, the CEO of Mozilla, announced that he will be stepping down from his role by the end of this year. After an astounding tenure of more than fifteen years at Mozilla, Beard’s immediate plans are to take a break and spend more time with his family. https://twitter.com/cbeard/status/1167091991487729664 Chris Beard’s journey at Mozilla started back in 2004, just before Firefox 1.0 was released. Since then he has been deeply involved in almost every part of the business including product, marketing, innovation, communications, community, and user engagement. In 2013, Beard worked as an Executive-in-Residence at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, gaining a deeper perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship. During this time he remained an advisor to Mozilla’s Chair, Mitchell Baker. Chris Beard’s appointment as CEO came during a very “tumultuous time” for Mozilla. In 2013, when Gary Kovacs stepped down as Mozilla’s CEO, the company was extensively looking for a new CEO. In March 2014, the company appointed its CTO Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript as CEO. Just a few weeks in the role, Eich had to resign from his position after it was revealed that he has donated $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California. Then in April 2014, Chris Beard was appointed as the interim CEO at Mozilla and was confirmed in the position on July 28. Throughout his tenure as a “Mozillian”, Chris Beard has made countless contributions to the company. Listing his achievements, Mozilla’s Chair, Mitchell Baker wrote in a thanking post, “This includes reinvigorating our flagship web browser Firefox to be once again a best-in-class product. It includes recharging our focus on meeting the online security and privacy needs facing people today. And it includes expanding our product offerings beyond the browser to include a suite of privacy and security-focused products and services from Facebook Container and Enhanced Tracking Protection to Firefox Monitor.” Read also: Firefox now comes with a Facebook Container extension to prevent Facebook from tracking user’s web activity Mozilla is now seeking a successor for Beard to lead the company. Mitchell Baker has agreed to step into an interim CEO role if the search continues beyond this year. Meanwhile, Chris Beard will continue to be an advisor to the board of directors and Baker. “And I will stay engaged for the long-term as an advisor to both Mitchell and the Board, as I’ve done before,” he wrote. Many of Beard’s co-workers thanked him for his contribution to Mozilla: https://twitter.com/kaykas/status/1167094792230076424 https://twitter.com/digitarald/status/1167107776734085120 https://twitter.com/hoosteeno/status/1167099338226429952 You can read Beard’s announcement on Mozilla’s blog. What’s new in web development this week Mozilla proposes WebAssembly Interface Types to enable language interoperability Google and Mozilla to remove Extended Validation indicators in Chrome 77 and Firefox 70 Mozilla’s MDN Web Docs gets new React-powered frontend, which is now in Beta

Yesterday, the Facebook Open Source team announced that they will no longer be able to contribute to the open source development of the Nuclide extension, Atom IDE, and other associated repos. https://twitter.com/fbOpenSource/status/1072928679695548416 Nuclide is a code editor built as a suite of features on top of the Atom text editor to provide hackability and the support of an active community. Facebook developed Nuclide to provide a first-class unified development environment for React Native, Hack, and Flow projects. Nuclide was first created for Facebook’s internal engineers and then was later open sourced in the hopes that others could also benefit from it too. In their announcement, Facebook told that this decision was made because they were not able to pay much attention to the project. They added, “However, our team has not been able to give this project the amount of attention and responsiveness it deserves and as a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Nuclide and associated repos, such as the Atom-IDE packages.” Though they are not going to contribute to the Nuclide open source project, Facebook will continue to use it internally: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696 The latest release, that is, Nuclide 0.366 will be the last release by Facebook. They have made its source code available in the Facebook Open Source Archive. The language and debugging services will still be supported in Atom and other compatible IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code or the clients listed on Langserver.org. Users on Hacker News are speculating that maybe this is the time to adopt VSCode and the main reason is that it provides good integration with TypeScript. Here’s what a user said, “A shame, in an ideal world there would be the benefit of outside contributions that made less internal work needed, so overall would be a win for Facebook. But probably this is related to Atom itself being taken over by VSCode, the number of users (and maybe contributors) appears to be going down.” Read the official announcement by Facebook on Nuclide’s website. Facebook’s artificial intelligence research team, FAIR, turns five. But what are its biggest accomplishments? Facebook AI research and NYU school of medicine announces new open-source AI models and MRI dataset as part of their FastMRI project Facebook plans to change its algorithm to demote “borderline content” that promotes misinformation, and hate speech on the platform

Yesterday, InfernoJS community announced the release of InfernoJS v6.0.0. This version comes with Fragments using which you can group a list of children without adding extra nodes to the DOM. Three new methods have been added: createRef, forwardRef, and rerender, along with few breaking changes. Added support for Fragments Support for Fragments, a new type of VNode, is added. It will enable you to group a list of children without adding extra nodes to the DOM. With Fragments, you can return an array from Component render creating an invisible layer which ties its content together but will not render any container to actual DOM. Fragments can be created using the following four ways: Native Inferno API: createFragment(children: any, childFlags: ChildFlags, key?: string | number | null) JSX: <> ... </>, <Fragment> .... </Fragment> or <Inferno.Fragment> ... </Inferno.Fragment> createElement API: createElement(Inferno.Fragment, {key: 'test'}, ...children) Hyperscript API: h(Inferno.Fragment, {key: 'test'}, children) createRef API Refs provide a way to access DOM nodes or React elements created in the render method. You can now create refs using createRef() and attach them to React elements via the ref attribute. This new method allows you to write nicer syntax and reduces code when no callback to DOM creation is needed. forwardRef API forwardRef API allows you to “forward” ref inside a functional Component. This new method will be useful if you want to create a reference to a specific element inside simple functional Components. Forwarding ref means, automatically passing a ref through a component to one of its children. rerender With the help of the rerender method, all the pending setState calls will be flushed and rendered immediately. You can use it in the cases when the render timing is important or to simplify tests. New lifecycle Old lifecycle methods, componentWillMount, componentWillReceiveProps, or componentWillUpdate, will not be called when the new lifecycle methods, getDerivedStateFromProps or getSnapshotBeforeUpdate are used. What are the breaking changes? Since not all applications need server-side rendering, hydrate is now a part of the inferno-hydrate package. Style properties now use hyphen. For example, backgroundColor => background-color. In order to support JSX Fragment syntax, babel-plugin-inferno now depends on babel v7. setState lifecycle is changed to have better compatibility with ReactJS. Also, componentDidUpdate will now be triggered later in the lifecycle chain, after refs have been created. String refs are completely removed. Instead, you can use callback refs, createRef API, or forward Refs. Read the release notes of InfernoJS on its GitHub repository. Node.js v10.12.0 (Current) released The Ember project announces version 3.4 of Ember.js, Ember Data, and Ember CLI React Native 0.57 released with major improvements in accessibility APIs, WKWebView-backed implementation, and more!

Version 6.1.0 of the popular JavaScript framework Angular is here. The latest version released yesterday mainly focuses on bug fixes, new features, and support for TypeScript. Let’s discuss these major updates that come with Angular 6.1.0. In the new version, a KeyValuePipe has been introduced. Support is now offered for  // ... and // TODO in mock compiler expectations. An urlUpdateStrategy feature have been added to the Angular router which allows you to update the browser URL at the beginning of navigation. Feature defaultKeyValueDiffers has been exported to private API. Angular 6.1.0 enables developers to configure the Angular Router so that it remembers the scrolling position of the user as he/she navigates through an application. You can reset the scroll position with the new navigation event and can restore the previous position on pressing the back button. In addition to these updates, View Encapsulation with ShadowDOM v1 is the new standard. ShadowDOM provides better cross-browser support. Due to this reason, the ViewEncapsulation.Native feature has been deprecated. View encapsulation is the process which associates Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) with the components in which they are defined. The KeyValueDiffer#diff feature now allows null values. The new release also offers support for TypeScript 2.9, and 2.8 in addition to 2.7. Apart from these, there are also other breaking changes and bug fixes. Other Changes Under animation, the end-state styles for orphaned DOM nodes have been rendered. The queried element styles in safari/edge have been properly cleaned up in the latest release. typescript is used to resolve the modules for metadata. Mark Meta and Title services are marked as tree shakable provider. versionedFiles in asset-group resources have been deprecated. SwPush.unsubscribe() has been fixed. To use @angular/bazel rules, you need to add calling ng_setup_workspace() in your WORKSPACE file. Angular 7 will be released sometime in September/October 2018. For a complete list of changes and bug fixes, check out the official release notes.    Angular 6 is here packed with exciting new features! Everything new in Angular 6: Angular Elements, CLI commands and more  

Last week, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 67, with many performance enhancing features to make Firefox “faster than ever”. On Thursday, Nathan Egge and Christopher Montgomery wrote a blogpost explaining the importance of high performance, royalty free AV1 video decoder, called ‘dav1d’. This feature is now enabled by default on all desktop platforms of Mozilla (Windows, OSX and Linux) for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. AV1 allows high-quality video experience with very less network usage. It’s files are 30% smaller than today’s most popular web codec VP9. AV1 is also 50% smaller than its widely deployed predecessor H.264. AV1 has the potential to transform how and where we watch videos on the internet. ‘Dav1d’ allows developers to rewrite critical sections in highly-parallelized SIMD assembly allowing higher performance and greater efficiency. This enables smooth playback of AV1 video in the browser with significantly less CPU utilization. In 2018, Matt Frost, head of strategy and partnerships for Chrome Media at Google had predicted that it would take another two years for AV1 to adopt wide scale. He had said, “Hardware support will likely come in 2020, as chip development typically takes two to three years”. However statistics prove that ‘dav1d’ can turn this prediction upside down. In the last few months, Firefox Beta has seen a remarkable growth in video playback after implementing AV1. Firefox Beta latest figures show 11.8% of playback proportion in April 2019, up from 3% in March and 0.85% in February. Looking at this growth, more websites are expected to take advantage of this next-generation video codec AV1. Image Source: Mozilla Hacks With its immense advantages, Mozilla has decided to invest in the future of AV1. Mozilla and Xiph.Org are jointly developing a clean-room encoder named rav1e (the Rust AV1 Encoder). This will help in increasing encoding gains, i.e., reducing the signal-to-noise ratio which in turn will allow software encoding fast enough for real-time applications like WebRTC. Rav1e will develop methods to make AV1 encoding tools 1000x faster by finding new algorithms, rather than simply optimizing existing code. https://twitter.com/waxzce/status/1132924406278307840 A user on Hacker News comments, “AV1's been making good progress in Firefox. A 1080p60 video has gone from being essentially unplayable in AV1 to now being almost perfect on my 5-year old, AVX2 enabled laptop in Firefox 68 beta” Visit the Mozilla Blog to know more about dav1d and rav1e. Firefox 67 will come with faster and reliable JavaScript debugging tools Firefox releases v66.0.4 and 60.6.2 to fix the expired certificate problem that ended up disabling add-ons Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs