Tech News

Welcome to this week's web development news bulletin. There's plenty of new software releases you might want to take note of... Web development news from the Packt Hub What's new in ECMAScript 2018? Get ready for Bootstrap 4.1. New software releases Quid has been released. It's a new tool that aims to support web component composition. Jekyll 3.8.0 has been released. The Jekyll team recently announced an update to their static website publishing tool with lots of new features. It includes some future-proofing improvements, and some bug fixes. Laravel 5.6.17 has been released. Laravel News notes that the release features "helpers to make subquery joins more straightforward, along with a few minor changes and locking Carbon at 1.25.* on the Laravel 5.6 branch." ReactiveSearch v2.6: Elasticsearch UI Components for Web. Version 2 of Google's Client library is now generally available. TypeORM 0.2.0 released - An ORM for TypeScript and JavaScript.

Tableau software has brought unique packages which combine new and existing analytical capabilities to scale data analytics across the organizations. With Tableau 2018.1, you can enable an effective data-driven enterprise by providing easy access to data among the entire workforce. Tableau is one of the leading business intelligence tools used to derive quality insights. With the remarkable growth of data that customers are experiencing, the demand to analyze and interact with data is the need of the hour. This is where Tableau’s range of products help in visually interacting with data to make critical decisions. Some of the noteworthy offerings available in Tableau 2018.1 are: Tableau Creator It provides full analytical capabilities to data analysts, BI professionals, and other power users. One can now take advantage of Tableau's suite of products to uncover data insights in a fast and effective way You can combine a range of products offered by Tableau for powerful data analytics on Web and Desktop. The products included in the suite are Tableau Desktop (No additional cost required), Tableau Prep (data preparation tool to help customers ready their data for analysis), and a license for Tableau Server (to publish and share reports and dashboards). Tableau Explorer Perform governed self-service data analytics to analyze data quickly with ease Collaborate with others based on governed data sources, create new dashboards, and get timely updates with new subscriptions and alerting. Tableau Viewer   This product enables you to extend the value of data across organizations in a cost-effective manner. Better data-driven decisions by interacting with dashboards and reports created by others. You will be able to view and filter dashboards, subscriptions, and data-driven alerts on mobile and Web. In addition to the above products, they have also released Tableau Prep - a new data preparation application, an improved version of Tableau Desktop, and new web authoring capabilities. These new tailored offerings allow people to leverage the power of data analytics in a way that is flexible, easy to wrap up, and simple to scale. You can now migrate your existing Tableau Server and Desktop installations to the new features offered, in the Tableau 2018.1 release. Once you have done the migration procedure, administrators will be able to assign a specific option -- Creator, Explorer, or Viewer -- to each user in their organization, thus completing the transition process. Read More Top 5 free Business Intelligence tools What Tableau Data Handling Engine has to offer Hands on Table Calculation Techniques with Tableau  

AWS recently announced that  SAM (Serverless Application Model) is now open source. With AWS SAM, one can define serverless applications in a simple and clean syntax. The AWS Serverless Application Model extends AWS CloudFormation and provides a simplified way of defining the Amazon Gateway APIs, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon DynamoDB tables needed by your serverless application. AWS SAM comprises of: the SAM specification Code translating the SAM templates into AWS CloudFormation Stacks General Information about the model Examples of common applications The SAM specification and implementation are open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license for AWS partners and customers to adopt and extend within their own toolsets. The current version of the SAM specification is available at AWS SAM 2016-10-31. Basic steps to create a serverless application with AWS SAM Step 1: Create a SAM template, a JSON or YAML configuration file that describes Lambda functions, API endpoints and the other resources in your application. Step 2: Test, upload, and deploy the application using the SAM Local CLI. During deployment, SAM automatically translates the application’s specification into CloudFormation syntax, filling in default values for any unspecified properties and determining the appropriate mappings and invocation permissions to set-up for any Lambda functions. To learn more about how to define and deploy serverless applications, read the How-To Guide and see examples. One can build serverless applications faster and further simplify one’s development of serverless applications by defining new event sources, new resource types, and new parameters within SAM. One can also modify SAM in order to integrate it with other frameworks and deployment providers from the community for building serverless applications. For more in-depth knowledge, read AWS SAM development guide on GitHub  

Jenkins is loved by many as the open source automation server, that provides different plugins  to support building, deploying, and automating any project. However, Jenkins is not a cloud-native tool, i.e., it lacks the OOTB (Out-Of-The-Box) capabilities to survive an outage, and scale seamlessly, among many other flaws. In order to make Jenkins cloud native, the team has come up with a brand new Jenkins X platform, an open source CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications, which would be deployed on Kubernetes. Jenkins X is currently a sub-project within the Jenkins Foundation. It fully focuses on Kubernetes, CI/CD and Cloud Native use cases for providing great developer productivity. With the Kubernetes plugin, one does not have to worry about provisioning VMs or physical servers for slaves. The target audience for Jenkins X include both the existing as well as new Jenkins users. It is specifically designed for those who are, Already using Kubernetes and want to adopt CI/CD, or Want to adopt CI/CD and want to increasingly move to the public cloud, even if they don’t know anything about Kubernetes. Key Features of Jenkins X An automated Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Delivery(CD) tool: Jenkins X does not require one to have a deep knowledge of the internals of a Jenkins pipeline. It provides a default setting and the best-fit pipelines for one’s projects, which would implement CI and CD fully. Automated management of the Environments: Jenkins X automates the management of the environments and the promotion of new versions of applications between environments, which each team gets, via GitOps. Automated Preview Environments: Jenkins X provides preview environments automatically for one’s pull requests. With this, one can get a faster feedback before changes are merged to master. Feedback on Issues and Pull Requests: Jenkins X automatically comments on Commits, Issues and Pull Requests with feedback when, Code is ready to be previewed, Code is promoted to environments, or If Pull Requests are generated automatically to upgrade versions. Some other notable features of Jenkins X are : Jenkins X uses a distribution of Jenkins as the core CI / CD engine. It also promotes a particular Git branching and repository model and includes tools and services, present within the distribution, to fit this model. The Jenkins X development model represents "best practice of developing Kubernetes applications", which is based in part on the experience of developing Fabric8, a project with a similar mission and on the results of the State of DevOps report. The advantage of Jenkins X is that if one follows the best practices, Jenkins X assembles all the pieces by itself, for instance, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Git, CI/CD etc. such that developers can be instantly productive. Jenkins X is shipped with K8s pipelines, agents, and integrations. This makes migrations to Kubernetes and microservices way simpler. jx: Jenkins X CLI tool Jenkins X also defines a command line tool, jx. This tool encapsulates tasks as high-level operations. Its CLI is used not only by developers from their computers, but also used by Jenkins Pipeline. It is a central user interface which allows: Easy installation of Jenkins X on any kubernetes cluster Create new Kubernetes clusters from scratch on the public cloud Set up Environments for each Team Import existing projects or create new Spring Boot applications and later: automatically set up the CI / CD pipeline and webhooks create new releases and promote them through the Environments on merge to master support Preview Environments on Pull Requests Read further more on Jenkins X on its official website.    

The long awaited general release of MySQL 8.0 was finally announced last week.  MySQL, as we all know, is the world’s most popular open source database. Despite the growing adoption of NoSQL databases, MySQL continues to be widely used across the industry. The new features introduced in version 8.0 bring significant upgrades in performance, security as well as database development and administration. What’s new in MySQL 8.0 server? Let’s take a quick overview of all the new features and additions introduced in MySQL 8.0, and how they may affect the developers and DBAs: SQL Window Functions, including major enhancements to table expressions, indexes, regular expressions, and more New JSON functions and enhancements to performance, for working with JSON values GIS Support added, which means MySQL 8.0 is now capable of handling and working with geographic data with efficiency. Spatial data types, indexes and functions have been introduced. Better reliability, with DDL statements becoming atomic and crash-safe. New enhancements to InnoDB means the metadata is now stored more securely and can be worked with in a better manner. Significant enhancements to performance schema, configuration variables, and error logging. New security enhancements, with improvements to OpenSSL, SQL roles, changes to authentication and privileges and more Performance improvements, with InnoDB now able to perform better read/write workloads and better resource optimization There are lot more enhancements to the MySQL database such as replication, MySQL shell, and the different DevAPI-based connectors.To know more about the newly added features in MySQL 8.0 in detail, you can check out their official blog page. Download the in-demand 8.0 release to try the new features of MySQL! Additionally, to upgrade your existing MySQL installation from the previous version, you can also check out official MySQL 8.0 documentation. Read More Top 10 MySQL 8 performance bench-marking aspects to know 12 most common MySQL errors you should be aware of  

ReSharper is one of the leading productivity tools from JetBrains. It is integrated with Visual Studio and provides enhancement and automation for .NET project development. JetBrains announced the general availability of ReSharper 2018.1, making it the first important release for this year. One of the major improvement speculated was the support for C# 7.2. JetBrains have finalized the support by adding all the entities that are specifically part of C# 7.2. This will ensure that the code written with latest C# modifiers and operators does not throw an error in ReSharper. Additionally, there are significant bug fixes made to this release. One of the improvements that Jetbrains highlighted in the release, is the Navigation. ReSharper 2018.1 has tools to better filter the search string and provide a better overview of the members of the code. Major additions in ReSharper Ultimate: Debug Step Filters in ReSharper C++ helps you in search related to functions while debugging. Include Analyzer helps with managing dependencies in the header files while compilation. Easy navigation with Analysis Subject panel in dotMemory 2018.1. The redesigned continuous testing mode in dotCover 2018.1 can be made to run in the existing unit test session instead of running another continuous test session. Console runner redesigned for dotCover 2018.1 helps giving coverage analysis for web applications running on IIS server. Code formatting engine has been improved to avoid problems related to indenting, line breaks, spaces, etc. Code formatting problems can be rectified in the code editor itself. Update in managing StyleCop rules directly from StyleCop configuration files. StyleCop analyzes the C# code for style and consistency throughout the development. This update will enhance consistency in code styling for C# developers. Other handy features to make developer's life simple are: Pre-/Post- build support for ReSharper Build engine A new option, known as Remember last search for navigation New settings for parentheses in function declaration and wrapping LINQ expressions ReSharper 2018.1 redefines the code navigation and enhances development with C# 7.x version. Also, improvements in unit testing in ReSharper will certainly catch attention for this release. Latest ReSharper Ultimate 2018.1 is available for download from the official JetBrains website.  

Welcome to the new week. Here is the data science bulletin with the latest data science news and software releases. The new TensorFlow is here (not long after the last version...), there's news of Apple open sourcing FoundationDB, and another Blockchain product from one of tech's biggest organizations. Data science news from the Packt Hub JupyterLab v0.32.0 releases. Data science news from across the web Apple has open sourced FoundationDB. Apple purchased the database company in 2015. But with a strategic goal of making FoundationDB "the foundation of the next generation of distributed databases." The team went on to explain that "The vision of FoundationDB is to start with a simple, powerful core and extend it through the addition of "layers". The key-value store, which is open sourced today, is the core, focused on incorporating only features that aren't possible to write in layers. Layers extend that core by adding features to model specific types of data and handle their access patterns." You can now access the FoundationDB source code on GitHub. AWS has announced a new Blockchain product. Blockchain Templates makes setting up cryptocurrency networks easier for app developers working on AWS. The announcement is an important move for Amazon, as it seeks to compete with the likes of Oracle and IBM who have also recently made plays within the Blockchain space. New software releases and updates SciPy 1.1.0rc1 has been released. TensorFlow 1.8.0-rc1 has been released. We reported last week that a new release was going to drop last week and here it is. Clearly the TensorFlow community has been busy... OpenAI releases evolved policy gradients. Evolved policy gradients are a metalearning algorithm that "evolves the loss function of learning agents, which can enable fast training on novel tasks." MySQL 8.0 now out on general availability. The new version of MySQL contains a range of interesting updates that are going to help consolidate its position in the database world. https://mysqlserverteam.com/whats-new-in-mysql-8-0-generally-available/

Bootstrap v4, made an initial appearance around the start of this year, as a major release of the popular front-end web development library. It was followed by 10 new themes built on Bootstrap 4 with its own build tools and customer support. It has been a month since the release of Bootstrap 4 and the version 4.1  is already here. Although, Bootstrap v4.1 is not massive in terms of new features or path-breaking changes, it hosts few smaller updates. Additionally, it has a basketful of fixes, doc updates, and build tool changes. Highlights of Bootstrap v4.1 New custom range form control is added. New .carousel-fade modifier is added to switch carousel from horizontal sliding to crossfade. Includes a new .dropdown-item-text for plaintext dropdown items. New .flex-fill, .flex-grow-*, and .flex-shrink-* utilities are added. New .table-borderless variant for tables added. New .text-monospace utility added. New .text-body (default body color), .text-black-50 (50% opacity black), and .text-white-50 (50% opacity white) utilities added. New .shadow-* utilities added for quickly adding box-shadows. Now you can disable Popper’s positioning in dropdowns. Theming docs are updated so now you will not be able to use CSS variables in media queries. The issue with Chrome rendering CSS columns incorrectly for cards is now fixed. .text-hide is deprecated as it’s a dated and undocumented feature. Dashboard and Offcanvas examples across Firefox and IE are now fixed. Breadcrumbs can now use non-string values as dividers. Find a detailed version of all fixes on the ship list and project board. With the Bootstrap version 4, it moved to a versioned docs setup. This means after each minor release, version 4 will have a new hosted version of Bootstrap docs. This would help developers avoid breaking URLs over the web who are yet to upgrade or want to stick to older versions of Bootstrap. The Bootstrap v4.1 release documentation is available on this new webpage and the older webpage remains the same. The upcoming Bootstrap release v4.1.1 would solve certain bug fixes for input groups and form fields that were missed in Bootstrap v4.1 due to insufficient time. Read More Web Development with React and Bootstrap Bootstrap 4 Objects, Components, Flexbox, and Layout Getting Started with ASP.NET Core and Bootstrap 4  

Ubuntu 18.04 official release is scheduled on April 26th 2018. Ubuntu 17.10 was released in October 2017 and within a span of 6 months, they are releasing their next big update in 18.04. The version numbers of Ubuntu have an interesting trait, where-in 18.04 will be released in the 4th month of 2018, similar to 17.10, which was released in 10th month of 2017. Ubuntu 18.04 comes with some exciting new feature releases: Extending support to color emojis All the previous versions of Ubuntu supported monochrome black and white emojis, which definitely lacked aesthetic appeal. This update might not be at the top of wishlist for anyone using Ubuntu, but emojis form an integral part of modern communication, and also comparing it to other distros like Fedora, which gained color emoji support long back. With 18.04 release, you can add and view color emojis, anytime, anywhere. The release uses Noto Color emoji font, which can be downloaded from the GitHub page. Shipping with Linux Kernel 4.15 Ubuntu 18.04 now ships with the slowest Linux kernel ever since 2011 i.e Kernel 4.15. This brings in much-needed Spectre and Meltdown patch fixes for Ubuntu 18.04. Furthermore, it has also added native-support for Raspberry Pi touchscreen, and has a significant performance boost for AMD GPUs. GNOME 3.28 Unity desktop environment is no longer the default environment anymore, since the release of customized GNOME in Ubuntu 17.10 release. They are planning to continue with it and plotting the latest version of GNOME (3.28) along with 18.04. Xorg display server Wayland was introduced as the default display server for Ubuntu along with the 17.10 release. But it has turned out to be an issue as a decent amount of applications were not supported on Wayland. Hence, in the new release Ubuntu is switching back to Xorg display server as the default option and wayland will be provided as an option to the users. Increase in boot speed Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has claimed that Ubuntu 18.04 will have a better boot speed as the systemd’s features will help identifying the bottleneck and solve them as quickly as possible. New installer for the server edition Ubuntu was using their debian text-based installer for their server edition but with the 18.04 release, server edition will be using the all new subiquity installer. Checkout the GitHub page for more about subiquity installer. For minor bug fixes, features and enhancements, refer to the FOSSBYTES blog.

Last month Google announced Cloud Text-to-Speech, their speech synthesis API that features DeepMind and WaveNet models. Now, they have announced their largest overhaul of Cloud Speech-to-Text (formerly known as Cloud Speech API) since it was introduced in 2016. Google’s Speech-to-Text API has been enhanced for business use cases, including phone-call and video transcription. With this new Cloud Speech-to-Text update one can get access to the latest research from Google’s machine learning expert team, all via a simple REST API. It also supports Standard service level agreement (SLA) with 99.9% availability. Here’s a sneak peek into the latest updates to Google’s Cloud Speech-to-Text API: New video and phone call transcription models: Google has added models created for specific use cases such as phone call transcriptions and transcriptions of audio from video.Video and phone call transcription models Readable text with automatic punctuation: Google created a new LSTM neural network to improve automating punctuation in long-form speech transcription. This Cloud Speech-to-Text model, currently in beta, can automatically suggest commas, question marks, and periods for your text. Use case description with recognition metadata: The information taken from transcribed audio or video with tags such as ‘voice commands to a Google home assistant’ or ‘soccer sport tv shows’, is aggregated across Cloud Speech-to-Text users to prioritize upcoming activities. To know more about this update in detail visit Google’s blog post.

Welcome to the cloud and networking news bulletin. Every Friday you'll find the latest updates and software releases from the world of cloud. End your week with an informative dose of tech news. Cloud and networking news on the Packt Hub Couchbase Mobile 2.0 is released. Cloud and networking news from across the web The U.S. Defense Department is taking big steps towards cloud computing. The team behind The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project is looking for IaaS and PaaS solutions - with a view to using cloud as the foundation for improved artificial intelligence projects. There has been concern from some quarters that DoD were planning to commit to a 10 year contract with a single vendor. However, Pentagon spokesperson Dana White suggested otherwise, saying "multiple vendors may form a partnership to offer us a competitive solution." Huawei adds Blockchain Service platform to its cloud computing services. The Chinese telecoms giant has revealed a new Blockchain Service platform. It should allow developers and businesses to build and scale Blockchain applications on Huawei's cloud. The organization suggests there could be a number of ways the service could be used, from improving financial transparency and security, to managing digital assets. VMware reveals new releases of vSphere and vSAN. The virtualization giants claim the updates are 'elevating' the way users experience hybrid cloud. Google overhauls cloud text-to-speech engine. It's been around for a couple of years now, but the new features look like they're going to make the tool more useful for businesses. With features including 'pre-built models for improved transcription accuracy from phone calls and video' and 'automatic punctuation to improve readability of transcribed long-form audio.' Esri and Alibaba Cloud working together to bring enhanced Location Intelligence technology to Cloud Users. Oracle's customer experience cloud suite expands its offerings. FireEye and Oracle Collaborate on Cloud Transformation.

ECMAScript 2018 -  also known as ES9 - is now complete with lots of features. Since the major features released with ECMAScript 2015 the language has matured with yearly update releases. After multiple draft submissions and completion of the 5-stage process, the TC39 committee has finalized the set of features that will be rolled out in June. The full list of proposals that were submitted to TC39 committee can be viewed in Github repository. What are the key features of ECMAScript 2018? Let’s have a quick look at the key ES9 features and how it is going to add value to web developers. Lifting template literal restriction Template literals generally allow the embedding of languages such as DSLs. However, restrictions on escape sequences make this quite complicated. Removing the restriction will create difficulty in handling cooked template values containing illegal escape sequences. The proposed feature will redefine the cooked value for illegal escape sequences to “undefined”. This lifting of restriction will allow illegal values like \xerxes and makes embedding of language simpler. The detailed proposal with templates can be viewed at Github. Asynchronous iterators The newer version will provide syntactic support for asynchronous iteration with both AsyncIterable and AsyncIterator protocols. The syntactic support will help in reading lines of text from HTTP connection easily. In my opinion, this is one of the most important and useful features which make the code looks simpler. It introduces a new IterationStatement, for-await-of, and also adds syntax which can create async generator functions. The detailed proposal can be viewed at Github. Promise.prototype.finally library As you are aware promise make execution of callback functions easy. Many promise libraries have a "finally" method through which you can run code no matter how the Promise provides resolution. It works by registering a callback which gets invoked when a promise gets fulfilled or denied. Bluebird, Q, and when are some examples. The detailed proposal can be viewed at Github. Unicode property escapes in regular expressions The ECMAScript 2018 version will have addition of Unicode property escapes `\p{…}` and `\P{…}` to regular expressions. These are a new and unique type of escape sequences with u flag set. With this feature, one can create Unicode-aware regular expressions with utmost ease. These escapes are easily readable, compact and get updated automatically from ECMAScript engine. The detailed proposal can be viewed at Github. RegExp lookbehind assertions Assertions are regular expressions which consist of anchors and lookarounds that either succeeds or fails based on the match found. ECMAScript has extended assertion, that does lookaround in forward direction, with lookbehind assertions that does in backward direction. This assertion will be helpful in instances like validating a dollar amount without capturing the dollar sign where a pattern/design is or is not preceded by another. The detailed proposal can be viewed at Github. Object Rest/spread properties The earlier version of ECMAScript includes rest and spread properties for array literals. Likewise, the newer version would be introducing rest and so read elements for object literals. Both these operations for Object would help in extracting properties which we want along with removing unwanted ones. The detailed proposal can be viewed at Github. RegExp named capture groups Capture Groups is another RegExp feature, similar to so called “named Groups” in Java and Python. With this, you can write RegExp to provide names in a format viz. (?<name>...) for different parts of the group. This allows you to use that name and grab whichever group you need in a simplistic way. The detailed proposal can be viewed at Github. s ‘dotAll’ flag for regular expressions In regular expression patterns, the earlier version allows dot (.) to match any character but with astral and line terminator characters like \n \f etc, creating regex was complicated. The newer version proposes addition of a new s flag which can match any character, including astral and line terminators. The detailed proposal can be viewed at Github. When will ECMAScript 2018 be available? All of the features above are expected to be implemented and available in browsers this year. It's in the name after all. But there are likely to be even more new features and capabilities in the 2019 release. Read this to get a clearer picture of what’s likely to feature in the 2019 release.

After 6 years of long anticipation, Magic Leap, the secretive billion dollar startup has finally unveiled its first augmented reality headset. This mysterious new device is supposedly priced at $1000 and hosts a variety of interesting new features. Let’s take a look at why this company, which is notoriously known to work in the “stealth mode”, has been gaining so much popularity. Magic Leap Origins Magic Leap was founded in 2010, by Rony Abovitz, a tech-savvy American entrepreneur. He previously founded a company which manufactured surgical robotic arm assistance platforms. But it was not until October 2014, when the company started to make the rounds in news by receiving $540 million of venture funding from Google, Qualcomm, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins, among other leading tech investors. Some saw this funding as a desperate attempt from Google to match Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, a virtual reality startup. This exaggerated valuation was based on little more than an ambitious vision of layering digital images on top of real-world objects with spatial glasses, and with no actual revenue or any products to show. The Anticipation After a year of the initial round of fundings, Magic Leap released a couple of cool demos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM Just another day in the office at Magic Leap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw0-JRa9n94 Everyday Magic with Mixed Reality Both these videos showcased augmented reality gaming and productivity applications. While the description in the first one mentioned that it was just a concept video that highlights the potential of augmented reality, the second video claimed that it was shot from the actual device without the use of any special effects. These demos skyrocketed the popularity of Magic Leap creating huge anticipation among the users, developers, and investors alike. This hype attracted the likes of Alibaba and Disney to join hands with them in their quest for the next generation Augmented Reality device. Product Announcement and Pricing After 4 years of hype videos and almost 2 billion dollars in funding Magic Leap finally unveiled their first product called Magic Leap One Creator Edition. These headsets are specifically catered to developers and will start shipping later this year. The Creator Edition consists of three pieces of hardware: Source: Magic Leap Official Website Lightwear: It’s the actual headset which uses “Digital Lightfield” display technology with multiple integrated sensors to gather spatial information. Lightpack: The core computing power of the headsets lies in the Lightpack, a circular belt-worn hip pack which is connected to the headset. Controller: It is a remote that contains buttons, six-degrees of freedom motion sensing, touchpad, and haptic feedback. The remote-shaped controller appears to be very similar to what we can see in Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream headset controllers. Along with the headsets, Magic Leap also launched the Lumin SDK, the toolkit which allows developers to build AR experiences for Lumin OS, the operating system that powers the Magic Leap One headset. There’s more! Magic Leap has made their SDK available in both Unity and Unreal game engines. This would allow a wide range of developers to start creating augmented reality experiences for their respective platforms. Although Magic Leap hasn’t shared any details on the exact pricing of the headsets, but if you go by what Rony Abovitz said in an interview, the price of the headset would be similar to that of a “Premium Computer”. He also mentioned that the company is planning to develop high-end devices for enterprises as well as lower-end versions for the common masses. Product trial shrouded in secrets Magic Leap, since their inception, have been claiming to revolutionize the AR/VR space with their mysterious technology. They boast that their proprietary features like “Digital Lightfield” and “Visual Perception”  would solve the long-standing problem of dizziness caused due to the continuous use of these headsets. Still, a lot of specifications are missing, like the field of view, or the processing power of the Lightpack processor. To add to the ambiguity, Magic Leap released a long list of security clauses for the developers who want to try out their products, some almost asking the developers to “lock away the hardware”. But this isn’t stopping the investors from pouring in more funds. Magic Leap just received another $461 million dollars from a Saudi Arabia sovereign investment arm. The uncertainty will only be cleared when the headsets become production ready and reach the consumers. Until then the hype remains... To know more about other features of Magic Leap One, check out their official webpage.

Welcome to this week's programming bulletin. There are a number of new releases that should interest fans of Spring, a preview of the next installment of .NET Core and Entity Framework and an update from JetBrains. Remember to watch this space every Thursday for more programming updates.  Programming news from the Packt Hub New features in C# 8.0 https://hub.packtpub.com/exciting-new-features-in-c-8-0/ Programming news from across the web Python launches an updated PyPi; the legacy version is set to close April 30. Spring Cloud Stream 2.0 is now on general availability. The emerging Spring framework, which helps users build event-driven microservices capable of scaling quickly, has just announced the general release of version 2.0. With 'a complete revamp of content-type negotiation functionality to address performance, flexibility, and... consistency', plus many more exciting features, this could help push the framework forward in the world of microservices development. Chaos Monkey now available for Spring Boot . In case you don't know, Chaos Monkey is a tool for testing large-scale distributed systems that is inspired by the principles of Chaos engineering. In this instance, it works as a small library that you integrate as a dependency within your application. It then attacks various components of your app - like a monkey causing chaos. Microsoft announces a preview of .NET Core 2.1 and Entity Framework 2.1. The .NET engineering team have made a preview of the latest versions of .NET Core and Entity Framework available - the team expects to reach a final full release in the next few months. Javalin 1.6.0 released. The new release features some improvements to performance and async requests. Jetbrains releases IntelliJ IDEA 2018.1.1 https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2018/04/intellij-idea-2018-1-1-is-released/  

Jupyterlab announced another series of beta release, v0.32.0 with numerous breaking changes in enhancements, bug fixes, and rectifications. This announcement follows closely at the heels of the initial JupyterLab beta release announcement made just two months ago. Jupyterlab is steadily approaching 1.0 release quickly with exciting components and features such as notebook, terminal, text editor, powerful UI and various third party extensions. With the rapid progress by the Jupyter team putting their entire focus on this project, the full and final release  of v1.0 is expected by June-July of this year. Let’s have a quick look at what’s new in this round of release. Major features and improvements New feature additions Added better provision for handling corrupted and invalid state databases. New option created to save documents automatically. Added more commands on scrolling, kernel restart in the notebook context menu. Supports proactive checking for completion metadata from kernels. Added new separate "Shutdown all" button in the Running panel for Terminals/Notebooks. Added support to rotate, flip, and invert images in the image viewer. Added support to display kernel banner in console while kernel restart. Improvements Performance improvements wherein non-focused documents poll the server less. Performance improvements for rendering text streams, especially around progress bars. Major performance improvements for viewing large CSV files. Context menu always visible in the file browser, even for an empty directory. Ability to handle asynchronous comm messages in the services library more correctly. Bug Fixes and Miscellaneous changes Fixed file dirty status indicator. Changed keyboard shortcut for singled-document-mode. “Restart Kernel" cancellation task functions correctly. Fixed UI with better error handling. You can download the source code to access all the exciting features of JupyterLab v0.32.0.