Tech News - Application Development

The Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is no longer the home of OpenJDK committers and other regular contributors. Traditionally the OpenJDK community used to meet at FOSDEM every February in Brussels, but since the OpenJDK team is now shipping a release every six months they agreed that it was time to meet more frequently. To fill this need the team decided to hold a Committer's workshop on the first two days of August at Oracle’s campus in Santa Clara, California, USA. Mark Reinhold, the Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle was the conductor of the orchestra here. He shed some light on the recent developments to the OpenJDK ecosystem and shared some future plans in yesterday’s sessions. OpenJDK’s new release model is a blessing in disguise It’s probably old news for developers who have been tracking the Java release cycle for some time now, but nonetheless, it’s very important for how things are going to change for OpenJDK. 2018 marked a new dawn for the Java platform. After endless discussions in the community about the new release being a repeat telecast of the same old Java 9 movie—a historic feature driven update to the platform with no head or tail on the release date—Mark put all the rumors to bed. He suggested to replace this feature driven update to a strict, time-based model with a new feature release every six months, update releases every quarter, and a long-term support release every three years. Image Source: OpenJDK Community Update For example, JDK 10 which was a new feature release was made available in March this year. The next release in six months would be JDK 11, which automatically becomes a candidate for a Long term support which would last till 2021, i.e three years as mentioned above. The biggest advantage of this release schedule is the simplified release process; takes off the pressure of adhering to strict deadlines from the developers. It also means that every feature would have to be completed before it makes the final cut, this way there are no multiple minor versions of the same release which confuses the users and developers alike. To what extent will Oracle contribute to the OpenJDK community? In the Committer's workshop Mark Reinhold cleared some questions about Oracle’s contribution to the OpenJDK ecosystem. He mentioned that Oracle engineers would be leading and be contributing only to the current feature releases and first two updates on the quarterly release. The non-Oracle folks can have the opportunity of taking the ownership of long-term release projects. This decision is taken mainly due to the fact that Oracle developers and engineers can focus on the future releases and their functionalities rather than working on support for long-term releases. An important clause which was discussed during this session was Oracle’s smooth transition of leadership whenever the engineers feel that they need to dial down their contribution to a particular release line they would hand over the leadership of that project with relative ease. Oracle finally embraces the Open Source Culture Now the biggest announcement that came in this workshop was Oracle open sourcing the elements of it proprietary JDK. Now before discussing this, it is important for us to understand what exactly is the difference between OpenJDK and Oracle’s proprietary JDK. Sun Microsystems, who originally created Java, announced in the JavaOne conference of 2006, that Java is going to be open sourced. OpenJDK was a result of a free implementation of the Standard Edition (SE) of the Java Platform. When Oracle bought Sun in 2009, they created their own proprietary version of the JDK which catered to the enterprise users who valued stability; and unlike OpenJDK, it has releases planned every three years. Now coming back to the point of open sourcing Oracle’s proprietary JDK, for a long time developers questioned Oracle’s intentions on how they plan to shape the future of Java, especially after their feud with Google over Android that began back in 2010. The open source community felt largely alienated from Oracle as they believed that Oracle was wrong in going after an open source friendly company like Google. Fast forward to 2018 and in this day and age, companies are embracing more and more open source technologies. Oracle has finally decided to open source their JDK which includes elements like Java flight recorder, Java Mission Control, and ZGC which is Oracle’s very own garbage collector. There will still be an Oracle JDK for the purposes of offering commercial support, but it will have the same functionalities as OpenJDK. Finally, Oracle is going to release all the builds for the current releases under the GPL license for developers who prefer non-commercial licensing. To know more about the different sessions that took place at the Committer's Workshop you can visit their Official webpage. Mark Reinhold on the evolution of Java platform and OpenJDK Oracle announces a new pricing structure for Java The top 5 reasons why Node.js could topple Java

On Monday, Neil Williams a software developer from Linux CodeHelp raised severity issues for Python 2 leaf packages in Debian which do not support Python 3. Neil has urged Debian maintainers to remove Python 2 from all the Debian packages. He specifically mentions one of the packages, Calibre, an e-book management software which is completely open source and licensed under the GNU GPL v3. Calibre is written primarily in Python with some C/C++ code for speed and system interfacing. But it is not yet compatible with Python 3 as it requires at least Python 2.7.9. In 2017, an issue was raised on the Calibre platform by a user, “Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3.” Kovid Goyal, author of the Calibre platform responded saying, “No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase.” Now the latest Calibre version requires Python modules which are no longer available for Python 2. Gregor Riepl, a systems engineer in response to Neil says, “As of now, calibre is not of sufficient quality to be part of a Debian release and until it drops all Python2 requirements, it must be considered RC buggy.” This means that Calibre >= 4.0 for the foreseeable future will not be available in Debian. Calibre version 3.48 will be the last version that can run on Debian until the upstream Calibre switches to Python 3. Riepl further asked Neil if his quality argument is due to the Calibre authors resistance to migrate to Python 3. Neil responded, “No, it is based just on the removal of Python2 from Debian and avoiding special cases. Right now, any and every package in Debian testing which requires Python2 and has no Python3 alternative in Debian or ready for upload is of poor quality for no other reason than that. All such packages are of such poor quality that the package should be removed from testing - in an orderly manner, leaf packages first. That is in the best interests of all users, despite what may or may not happen to any particular subset(s) of users.  The decision flow is easy - if the answer in each case is "no", then move on to the next and if you get to the bottom, the bug should be RC. * Has the package already been removed from testing? * Is a Python3-only version already in Debian? * Is a Python3-only version available upstream? * Does the package have any reverse dependencies? * If you get here, it is already too late, there have already been   enough warnings. Upgrade the bug to RC and get the package   auto-removed from testing.” Neil said he was aware of the history of Calibre and understood what would happen if it is no longer a part of Debian. But that did not matter as removal of Python 2 is more important for the next Debian release. He also believes that Calibre has a relatively large user base that doesn't know much or care about the Python 2 deprecation. User will simply perceive dropping Calibre as a bad move on Debian's side and rush towards other packages of significantly lower quality. He further concluded, “Calibre is nothing special - it's a Python2 leaf package like vland and tftpy and any one of far too many others. Calibre can stay in unstable - it will go FTBFS, of course, but that isn't a problem either, IMHO. It's calibre's problem - not Debian's problem. There's always the option of users installing the old Python2 stuff from Buster to keep calibre hobbling along. Debian is the higher priority here. Calibre would be nice to have but it does not deserve to cause delays on anybody else's voluntary effort. No package has that right.” Community feels Python 2 will result in unmaintained runtime and libraries in packages On Hacker News, users are discussing how Python foundation is pushing in packages to migrate to Python 3 that will result in Python 2 having an entire set of unmaintained runtime and libraries in the package repository. One user comments, “Historically, Debian hasn't particularly objected to packaging obsolete versions of programming languages without upstream support. I doubt anyone is checking for potential security problems in Algol 68 and Fortran 77 implementations that Debian ships, and I don't think the people using those packages are particularly inconvenienced by that. It seems a shame that the social pressure to persuade people to port their code to Python 3 means that Debian is going to have weaker support for 10-year-old Python than 40-year-old Fortran. In particular, there are ongoing efforts to try to make it the normal thing for scientists to make the programs they ran on their data available so that their results can be reproduced; aggressively dropping older programming language implementations rather gets in the way of that.” Another user responded, “This isn't about "languages". It's about software! Algol 68 and Fortran 77 may have stale (but maintained) compilers or interpreters in the package repository. Starting very soon - Python 2 will have an entire set of unmaintained runtime and libraries in the package repository. You know - actual, officially, unmaintained software! Unmaintained software that other packages, including Calibre in this example, further build on. Of course they're throwing this out.” Python 3.8 is now available with walrus operator, positional-only parameters support for Vectorcall, and more Core Python team confirms sunsetting Python 2 on January 1, 2020 PyPy will continue to support Python 2.7, even as major Python projects migrate to Python 3

Go, the popular programming language is adding an internal language server protocol (LSP). This is expected to bring features like code autocompletion and diagnostics available in Golang. LSP is used between a user and a server to integrate features such as autocomplete, go to definition, find all references and alike into the tool. It was created by Microsoft to define a common language for enabling programming language analyzers to communicate. It is growing in popularity with adoption from companies like Codenvy, Red Hat, and Sourcegraph. There is also a rapidly growing list of editor and language communities supporting LSP. Golang already has a language server available on GitHub. This version has support for Hover jump to def, workspace symbols, and find references. But, it does not support code completion and diagnostics. Sourcegraph CEO Quinn Slack stated in a comment on Hacker News: “The idea is that with a Go language server becoming a core part of Go, it will have a lot more resources invested into it and it will surpass where the current implementation is now.” The Go language server made by Sourcegraph available currently on GitHub is not a core part of Golang. It uses tools and custom extensions not maintained by the Go team. The hope is that the core LSP implementation will be good enough and that SourceGraph can re-use this implementation in the future to bring down the number of implementations to just one. Slack said in a comment that they are very happy with this implementation: “We are 10,000% supportive of this, as we've discussed openly in the golang-tools group and with the Go team. The Go team was commendably empathetic about the optics here, and we urged them very, very, very directly to do this.” This core implementation of LSP by the Golang team is also beneficial for Sourcegraph from a business perspective. Sourcegraph sells a product that lets you search and browse all your code, which involves using language servers for certain features like hovers, definitions and references. Since the core work will be done by the Golang team, Sourcegraph won’t have to invest more time into building their implementation of Go language server. For more information, visit the Googlesource website. Golang 1.11 is here with modules and experimental WebAssembly port among other updates Why Golang is the fastest growing language on GitHub Go 2 design drafts include plans for better error handling and generics

Last week, the team behind Git released Git 2.23 that comes with experimental commands, backward compatibility and much more. This release has received contributions from over 77 contributors out of which 26 were new. What’s new in Git 2.23? Experimental commands This release comes with a new pair of experimental commands, git switch and git restore for providing a better interface for the git checkout.  “Two new commands "git switch" and "git restore" are introduced to split "checking out a branch to work on advancing its history" and "checking out paths out of the index and/or a tree-ish to work on advancing the current history" out of the single "git checkout" command,” the official mail thread reads.  Git checkout can be used to change branches with git checkout <branch>. In case if the user doesn’t want to switch branches, git checkout can be used to change individual files, too. These new commands aim to separate the responsibilities of git checkout into two narrower categories that is operations, which change branches and operations that change files.  Backward compatibility  The "--base" option of "format-patch" is now compatible with "git patch-id --stable".  Git fast-export/import pair The "git fast-export/import" pair will be now used to handle commits with log messages in encoding other than UTF-8. git clone --recurse-submodules "git clone --recurse-submodules" has now learned to set up the submodules for ignoring commit object names that are recorded in the superproject gitlink. git diff/grep The pattern "git diff/grep" that is used for extracting funcname and words boundary for Rust has now been added. git fetch" and "git pull The commands "git fetch" and "git pull" are used to report when a fetch results in non-fast-forward updates that lets the user notice unusual situation.    git status With this release, the extra blank lines in "git status" output have been reduced. Developer support This release comes with developer support for emulating unsatisfied prerequisites in tests for ensuring that the remainder of the tests succeeds when tests with prerequisites are skipped. A new tutorial for git-core developers This release comes with a new tutorial that target aspiring git-core developers. This tutorial demonstrates end-to-end workflow of creating a change to the Git tree, for sending it for review, as well as making changes that are based on comments. Bug fixes in Git 2.23 In the earlier version, "git worktree add" used to fail when another worktree that was connected to the same repository was corrupt. This issue has been corrected in this release. An issue with the file descriptor has been fixed. This release comes with an updated parameter validation. The code for parsing scaled numbers out of configuration files has been made more robust and easier to follow with this release. Few users seem to be happy about the new changes made, a user commented on HackerNews, “It's nice to hear that there appears to be progress being made in making git's tooling nicer and more consistent. Git's model itself is pretty simple, but the command line tools for working with it aren't and I feel that this fuels most of the "Git is hard" complaints.” Few others are still skeptical about the new commands, another user commented, “On the one hand I'm happy on the new "switch" and "restore" commands. On the other hand, I wonder if they truly add any value other than the semantic distinction of functions otherwise present in checkout.” To know more about this news in detail, read the official blog post on GitHub. GitHub has blocked an Iranian software developer’s account GitHub services experienced a 41-minute disruption yesterday iPhone can be hacked via a legit-looking malicious lightning USB cable worth $200, DefCon 27 demo shows

Two days ago, the Qt team released the technical preview of an open source QML design viewer based on the Qt for WebAssembly. This design viewer will enable the QML application to be run on web browsers like Chrome, Safari, FireFox and Edge. The Qt for WebAssembly is a platform plugin which allows the user to build Qt applications with web page integrations.  For running a custom QML application, a user will have to define the main QML file and the import paths with a .qmlproject file. The project folder then has to be compressed as a ZIP file and uploaded to the design viewer. Users can also generate a resource file out of their project and upload the package. Image source: Qt blog Read More: Qt introduces Qt for MCUs, a graphics toolkit for creating a fluid user interface on microcontrollers The Qt team has tested the design viewer with the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, FireFox and Edge and has found that the QML application runs well on all the web browsers. “The startup and compilation time depends on your browser and configuration, but the actual performance of the application, once it is started, is indistinguishable from the same application running on the desktop,” states the official blog. This design viewer also runs on Android and iOS and is shipped with most QML modules  and is based on a snapshot of Qt 5.14. Many users have liked the web based design viewer A user on Hacker News comments, “One of the most beautiful things I have seen in 2019. Brilliant!” Another comment read, “This looks pretty cool! I am actually shopping for a GUI framework for a new project and WebAssembly support is a potential critical feature.” Qt and LG Electronics partner to make webOS as the platform of choice for embedded smart devices GitLab retracts its privacy invasion policy after backlash from community Are we entering the quantum computing era? Google’s Sycamore achieves ‘quantum supremacy’ while IBM refutes the claim

Yesterday, JetBrains announced the release of IntelliJ IDEA 2019.2 Beta 2, which marks the next step towards the stable release. The team has already implemented major features like profiling tools, better shell script support, a new Services tool window, among others. With this release, the team has given a final polish to the existing features including the Terminal that now soft-wraps long lines better. This solves the previous problem of breaking links while wrapping lines. Source: IntelliJ IDEA Shell script support This release will come with rich editing features for shell scripts including word and path completion, quick documentation preview, and textual rename. Additionally, it will also allow integration with various other external tools to provide developers an enhanced shell script support. For instance, the IDE will prompt you to install ShellCheck to detect possible errors in your scripts and also suggest quick fixes for them. A new Services tool window IntelliJ IDEA 2019.2 will introduce a new Services tool window, which will be your single stop to view all connections and run configurations that are configured to be reported to the Services view.  The Services view will incorporate windows for several tools such as RunDashboard, Database Console, Docker, and Application Servers. You have the option of viewing all the service types as nodes or tabs. To view a service type on a separate tab you can either use the Show in New tab action from the toolbar or simply drag and drop the needed node on to the edge of the Services tool window. You can also create a custom tab to group various services using the Group Services action from the context menu or from the toolbar. Source: IntelliJ IDEA Profiling tools for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate You will be able to analyze the performance of your application right from the IDE using the new CPU Profiler integration and Memory Profiler integration on macOS, Linux, and Windows. It will also come integrated with Java Flight Recorder and Async profiler. This will help you get an insight into how the CPU and memory resources are allocated in your application. To run Java Flight Recorder or Async profiler, you just need to click the icon on the main toolbar or the run icon in the gutter. These tools will only be available in the professional and fully-featured commercial IDE, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate. Source: IntelliJ IDEA Syntax highlighting for over 20 different programming languages IntelliJ IDEA 2019.2 will provide syntax highlighting for more than 20 different languages. To provide this support, this upcoming version comes integrated with TextMate text editor and a collection of built-in grammar files for various languages. You can find the full list of supported languages in Preferences / Settings | Editor | TextMate Bundles. In case you require syntax highlighting for any additional languages, you can download the TextMate bundle for the selected language and import it into IntelliJ IDEA. Commit directly from the Local Changes With this version, developers will be able to commit directly from the Local Changes tab without having to go through a separate Commit dialog. While working on a commit, you will be able to browse through the source code, view the file history, view the diff for the file in the same area as the commit, or use other features of the IDE. In previous versions, all these actions were impossible because the modal commit dialog blocked all the other IDE functionality. Additionally, there is a new feature for projects that are using version systems like Git or Mercurial. You just need to press the Commit shortcut (Ctrl-K on Windows, Linux/Cmd-K on macOS) and the IDE will select the modified files for the commit. You will then be able to review the selected files and change the file or code chunk. Source: IntelliJ IDEA These were some of the features coming in IntelliJ IDEA 2019.2. You can read the entire release notes and stay updated with the IntelliJ IDEA blog to know more in detail. Developers are excited about the profiling tools and other shining features bundled with this release: https://twitter.com/Rahamat87523498/status/1149221123256492032 https://twitter.com/goKarumi/status/1148849477136146432 https://twitter.com/matsumana/status/1140659765518852097 What’s new in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.2 IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 Early Access Program is now open! Netbeans, Intellij IDEA and PyCharm come to Haiku OS

Last week, Qt introduced Qt for Python 5.12, an official set of Python bindings for Qt, used for simplifying the creation of innovative and immersive user interfaces for Python applications. With Qt for Python 5.12, it is possible to quickly visualize the massive amounts of data tied to their Python development projects. https://twitter.com/qtproject/status/1076003585979232256 Qt for Python 5.12 comes with a cross-platform environment for all development needs. Qt’s user interface development framework features APIs and expansive graphics libraries. Qt for Python 5.12 provides the developers with a user-friendly platform. It is fully supported by the Qt Professional Services team of development experts and practitioners, as well as Qt’s global community. Lars Knoll, CTO of Qt, said, “Considering the huge data sets that Python developers work with on a daily basis, Qt’s graphical capabilities makes it a perfect fit for the creation of immersive Python user interfaces. With Qt for Python 5.12, our customers can build those user interfaces faster and more easily than ever before – with the knowledge that they are backed by a global team of Qt and user interface experts.” Features of Qt for Python 5.12 PySide2 Qt comes with a C++ framework, combined with the PySide2 Python module that offers a comprehensive set of bindings between Python and Qt Qt GUI Creation Qt Graphical User Interface (GUI) creation consists of the following functional modules: Qt Widgets: The Qt Widgets Module comes with a set of user interface elements for creating classic desktop-style user interfaces. Qt Quick: The Qt Quick module, a standard library for writing QML applications, contains Quick Controls for creating fluid user interfaces. Qt QML: The Qt QML module features a framework for developing applications and libraries with the QML language, a declarative language that allows user interfaces to be described in terms of their visual components. Environment familiarity: Qt for Python 5.12 comes with a familiar development environment for Python developers. PyPI: Python Package Index (PyPI) makes the installation process of Qt for Python 5.12 easy. VFX Reference Platform integration: Qt and Qt for Python 5.12 are integral parts of the VFX Reference Platform, a set of tool and library versions used for building software for the VFX industry. Qt 3D Animation: The Qt 3D animation module features a set of prebuilt elements to help developers get started with Qt 3D. Qt Sql: It provides a driver layer, SQL API layer, and a user interface layer for SQL databases. Qt for Python 5.12 is available under commercial licensing, as part of the products Qt for Application Development and Qt for Device Creation, and as open-source under the LGPLv3 license. Qt TextToSpeech: It provides an API for accessing text-to-speech engines. Easy and quick development Development with Qt for Python 5.12 is fun, fast and flexible. Developers can easily work on their applications using Qt for Python 5.12. Developers can power their UI development by utilizing ready-made widgets, controls, beautiful charts, and data visualizations and create stunning 2D/3D graphics for Python projects. Qt Community Developers can exchange ideas, learn, share, and connect with the Qt community. Global Qt Services Global Qt services provide tailored support at every stage of the product development lifecycle. What’s next in Qt for Python The team at Qt might simplify the deployment of PySide2 applications. They might also provide a smoother interaction with other Python modules and support other platforms like embedded and mobile. Users are excited about this project and are eagerly waiting for the stable release. Qt for Python will be helpful for developers as it makes the process of developing desktop apps easier. But few users still are with PyQt5 as the stable release for Qt for python hasn’t been rolled out yet. The switch from PyQt to PySide might be difficult for many. To know more about Qt for Python 5.12, check out Qt’s official website. Getting started with Qt Widgets in Android Qt Design Studio 1.0 released with Qt photoshop bridge, timeline based animations and Qt live preview Qt team releases Qt Creator 4.8.0 and Qt 5.12 LTS

The latest version of GNOME 3 has been released today. GNOME 3.30 features many significant performance improvements. In total, the release incorporates 24845 changes, made by approximately 801 contributors. GNOME is a desktop environment composed of free and open-source software that runs on Linux and most BSD derivatives. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Fun Fact: 3.30 has been named “Almería” in recognition of this year’s GUADEC organizing team. GUADEC is GNOME’s primary annual conference which was held in Almería, Spain this year.[/box] Improvements to Desktop performance The entire desktop now uses fewer system resources. Users can now run multiple apps at once without encountering performance issues. Improved Screen Sharing With GNOME 3.30, it is now easier than ever to control screen sharing and remote desktop sessions. A newly added system menu displays an indicator when a remote connection is active, making it easy to stop the session when finished. Update Flatpaks Automatically Flatpak is an emerging technology that makes getting apps fast and secure. Many new apps are already available on Flathub which is a repository of curated Flatpaks. GNOME software manager, can now automatically update installed Flatpaks. Focus on Content Web, the GNOME browser, now comes with a new minimal reader view. Web can toggle between the normal view and the clean, minimal reader view when viewing a compatible web page. The minimal reader view removes irrelevant menus, images, and content not related to the article or document. Updates to GNOME Virtual machine application Boxes, the GNOME virtual machine application, can now connect to remote Windows servers using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Boxes also now has the ability to import OVA files, making sharing virtual machines even easier. Gaming Application changes Games, the retro gaming application can now be navigated by gamepad making it faster to use: The keyboard is mappable to gamepad inputs. Additional details about each available game is displayed in the collection view. The Flatpak bundles 4 more emulator cores. GNOME 3.30 introduces a new podcast app called Podcasts that lets you subscribe and listen to your favorite podcasts, right from your desktop. These are just a select few updates. For a complete list of updates, read the GNOME Blog. Deploying HTML5 Applications with GNOME. Install GNOME-Shell on Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Is Linux hard to learn?

Last week, the team behind Electron announced that they will share the release timeline for Electron 5.0 and beyond publicly. For now, they have posted the schedule for Electron 5.0, which will include M72 and Node 12.0. Here’s the schedule the team has made public, which can still have some changes: Source: Electron The Electron team has been working towards making its release cycles faster and more stable. In December last year, they planned to release a new version of Electron in cadence with the new versions of its major components including Chromium, V8, and Node. They started working according to this plan and have seen some success. Source: Electron The team was able to release last two versions of Electron (3.0 and 4.0) almost parallelly with Chromium’s latest versions. To keep up with Chromium releases, the two versions were released with a 2-3 month timeline for each release. They will be continuing this pattern for Electron 5.0 and beyond. So, for now, developers can expect a major Electron release approximately every quarter. Read the timeline shared by the Electron team on their official website. Flutter challenges Electron, soon to release a desktop client to accelerate mobile development Electron 3.0.0 releases with experimental textfield, and button APIs Electron Fiddle: A ‘code playground’ for experimenting with cross-platform native apps

Yesterday, the team behind Qt announced the release of Qt 5.13. This release comes with fully-supported Qt for WebAssembly, Chromium 73-based QT WebEngine, and many other updates. In this release, the Qt community and the team have focused on improving the tooling to make designing, developing, and deploying software with Qt more efficient. https://twitter.com/qtproject/status/1141627444933398528 Following are some of Qt 5.13 highlights: Fully-supported Qt for WebAssembly Qt for WebAssembly makes it possible to build Qt applications for web browsers. The team previewed this platform in Qt 5.12 and beginning this release Qt for WebAssembly is fully-supported. This module uses Emscripten, the LLVM to JavaScript compiler to compile Qt applications for a web server. This will allow developers to run their native applications in any browser provided it supports WebAssembly. Updates in the QT QML module The QT QML module enables you to write applications and libraries in the QML language. Qt 5.13 comes with improved support for enums declared in  C++. With this release, JavaScript “null” as the binding value will be optimized at compile time. Also, QML will now generate function tables on 64-bit Windows making it possible to unwind the stack through JITed functions. Updates in Qt Quick and Qt Quick Controls 2 Qt Quick is the standard library for writing QML applications, which provides all the basic types required for creating user interfaces. With this release, support is added to TableView that allows hiding rows and columns. Qt Quick Controls 2 provides a set of UI controls for creating user interfaces. This release brings a new control named SplitView using which you can lay out items horizontally or vertically with a draggable splitter between each item. Additionally, the team has also added a cache property to the icon. Qt WebEngine Qt WebEngine provides a web browser engine that makes embedding content from the web into your applications easier on platforms that do not have a native web engine. This engine uses the code from the open-source Chromium project. Qt WebEngine is now based on Chromium 73. This latest version supports PDF viewing via an internal Chromium extension, Web Notifications API, and thread-safe and page-specific URL request interceptors. It also comes with an application-local client certificate store and client certificate support from QML. Lars Knoll, Qt’s CTO and Tuukka Turunen, Qt’s Head of R&D will be holding a webinar on July 2 to summarize all the news around Qt 5.13. Read the official announcement on Qt’s official website to know more in detail. Qt Creator 4.9.0 released with language support, QML support, profiling and much more Qt installation on different platforms [Tutorial] Qt Creator 4.9 Beta released with QML support, programming language support and more!

Two days ago, Linus Torvalds, the principal developer of the Linux kernel announced the release of Linux 5.2 in his usual humorous way, describing it as a ‘Bobtail Squid’. The release has new additions like the inclusion of the Sound Open Firmware (SOF) project, improved pressure stall information, new mount API, significant performance improvements in the BFQ I/O scheduler, new GPU drivers, optional support for case-insensitive names in ext4 and more. The earlier version, Linux 5.1 was released exactly two months ago. Torvalds says, “there really doesn't seem to be any reason for another rc, since it's been very quiet. Yes, I had a few pull requests since rc7, but they were all small, and I had many more that are for the upcoming merge window. So despite a fairly late core revert, I don't see any real reason for another week of rc, and so we have a v5.2 with the normal release timing.” Linux 5.2 also kicks off the Linux 5.3 merge window. What’s new in Linux 5.2? Inclusion of Sound Open Firmware (SOF) project Linux 5.2 includes Sound Open Firmware (SOF) project, which has been created to reduce firmware issues by providing an open source platform to create open source firmware for audio DSPs. The SOF project is backed by Intel and Google. This will enable users to have open source firmware, personalize it, and also use the power of the DSP processors in their sound cards in imaginative ways. Improved Pressure Stall information With this release, users can configure sensitive thresholds and use poll() and friends to be notified, whenever a certain pressure threshold is breached within the user-defined time window. This allows Android to monitor and prevent mounting memory shortages, before they cause problems for the user. New mount API With Linux 5.2, Linux developers have redesigned the entire mount API, thus resulting in addition of six new syscalls: fsopen(2), fsconfig(2), fsmount(2), move_mount(2), fspick(2), and open_tree(2). The previous mount(2) interface was not easy for applications and users to understand the returned errors, was not suitable for the specification of multiple sources such as overlayfs need and it was not possible to mount a file system into another mount namespace. Significant performance improvements in the BFQ I/O scheduler BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler available for block devices since the 4.12 kernel release. It associates each process or group of processes with a weight, and grants a fraction of the available I/O bandwidth to that proportional weight. In Linux 5.2, there have been performance tweaks to the BFQ I/O scheduler such that the application start-up time has increased under load by up to 80%. This drastically increases the performance and decreases the execution time of the BFQ I/O scheduler. New GPU drivers for ARM Mali devices In the past, the Linux community had to create open source drivers for the Mali GPUs, as ARM has never been open source friendly with the GPU drivers. Linux 5.2 has two new community drivers for ARM Mali accelerators, such that lima covers the older t4xx and panfrost the newer 6xx/7xx series. This is expected to help the ARM Mali accelerators. More CPU bug protection, and "mitigations" boot option Linux 5.2 release has more bug infrastructure added to deal with the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) hardware vulnerability, thus allowing access to data available in various CPU internal buffers. Also, in order to help users to deal with the ever increasing amount of CPU bugs across different architectures, the kernel boot option mitigations= has been added. It's a set of curated, arch-independent options to enable/disable protections regardless irrespective of the system they are running in. clone(2) to return pidfds Due to the design of Unix, sending signals to processes or gathering /proc information is not always safe due to the possibility of PID reuse. With clone(2) returning to pidfds, it will allow users to get pids at process creation time, which are usable with the pidfd_send_signal(2) syscall. pidfds helps Linux to avoid this problem, and the new clone(2) flag will make it even easier to get pidfs, thus providing an easy way to signal and process PID metadata safely. Optional support for case-insensitive names in ext4 This release implements support for case-insensitive file name lookups in ext4, based on the feature bit and the encoding stored in the superblock. This will enable users to configure directories with chattr +F (EXT4_CASEFOLD_FL) attribute. This attribute is only enabled on empty directories for filesystems that support the encoding feature, thus preventing collision of file names that differ by case. Freezer controller for cgroups v2 added A freezer controller provides an ability to stop the workload in a cgroup and temporarily free up some resources (cpu, io, network bandwidth and, potentially, memory) for some other tasks. Cgroup v2 lacked this functionality, until this release. This functionality is always available and is represented by cgroup.freeze and cgroup.events cgroup control files. Device mapper dust target added Linux 5.2 adds a device mapper 'dust' target to simulate a device that has failing sectors and/or read failures. It also adds the ability to enable the emulation of the read failures at an arbitrary time. The 'dust' target aims to help storage developers and sysadmins that want to test their storage stack. Users are quite happy with the Linux 5.2 release. https://twitter.com/ejizhan/status/1148047044864557057 https://twitter.com/konigssohne/status/1148014299484512256 https://twitter.com/YuzuSoftMoe/status/1148419200228179968 Linux 5.2 has many other performance improvements introduced in the file systems, memory management, block layer and more. Visit the kernelnewbies page, for more details. “Don’t break your users and create a community culture”, says Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2019 Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, was hacked; Ubuntu source code unaffected OpenWrt 18.06.4 released with updated Linux kernel, security fixes Curl and the Linux kernel and much more!

Yesterday, Mozilla released the latest versions of Firefox for desktop, Android, and iOS. The latest version for desktop and Android users is Firefox 62.0 and for iOS users it is Firefox 13.2. They have made some changes for faster page loads, better scrolling performance, a newly added Dark theme for iOS users, and much more. They have also laid foundation for upcoming release, Firefox 63, by allowing users to distrust certificates issued by Symantec. In Firefox 63, all trust for Symantec-issued certificates will be removed. What’s new for desktop users? The default New Tab, Firefox Home, now can display up to 4 rows of top sites, Pocket stories, and highlights. The Reopen in Container option is added for users with Containers that lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container. Dark theme is automatically enabled in macOS 10.14 dark mode. Improved graphics rendering for Windows users without accelerated hardware. Users opting to disconnect from Sync can now wipe their Firefox profile data, including bookmarks, passwords, history, cookies, and site data from their desktop computer. FreeBSD support is added for WebAuthn. The Description field for bookmarks is removed. Added support for CSS Shapes for richer web page layouts. Added support for CSS Variable Fonts to create beautiful typography with a single font file. What’s new for Android users? Scrolling performance is improved. Page loading is now faster over WiFi connections by loading from the network cache if disk cache is slow. Notifications settings provides a toggle button, Product and feature tips, to allow more control over which notifications are shown. What’s new for iOS users? New dark theme: Firefox for iOS now supports dark and light theme. According to your preference, you can easily switch between the two themes either manually or automatically. To enable this manually, tap Settings in the menu panel, then, tap Display, and choose either Light or Dark. To automatically turn it on you can use Automatic switch. Source: Mozilla Improved searching experience: They have made some improvements to make searching content easier. Tab settings can now be managed in a single view allowing  you to make changes easily and quickly. You will also be able to search your open tabs and seamlessly switch between normal and private browsing. Source: Mozilla To know more, read Mozilla’s official announcement and also check their release notes. Mozilla, Internet Society, and web foundation wants G20 to address “techlash” fuelled by security and privacy concerns Mozilla’s new Firefox DNS security updates spark privacy hue and cry Firefox Nightly browser: Debugging your app is now fun with Mozilla’s new ‘time travel’ feature

Last week, the team behind GNU Radio announced the release of GNU Radio 3.8, a free and open-source software development toolkit. GNU Radio 3.8.0.0 comes with a few major changes and deprecations. Major changes in GNU Radio 3.8.0.0 Dependencies With this release, new dependencies have been introduced including MPIR/GMP, Qt5, codec2, gsm. The team has removed few of the dependencies including libusb, Qt4, and CppUnit Python compatibility This release is Python 2 and Python 3 compatible. Also, GNU Radio 3.8 is going to be the last Py2k-compatible release series. Gengen got replaced Gengen (GENerator GENerator) a tool that generates a text generator got replaced by templates. gnuradio-runtime The team has reworked on fractional tag time handling which is in the context of resamplers C++ generation In this release, C++ generation has been introduced as an option. gr-utils The gr_modtool has also improved now. Some deprecations in GNU Radio 3.8  Modules Modules gr-comedi, gr-fcd and gr-wxgui have been removed. Gr-comedi Gr-comedi has been removed as it had 0 active code contributions in the 3.7 lifecycle. gr-fcd Gr-fcd is getting removed as it is currently untestable by the CI and as there were no code contributions. It seems few users are excited to experiment with GNU Radio 3.8 in the near future. A user commented on HackerNews, “GNU Radio is one of those examples of free software being hyper-niche yet super successful. It's something I want to start playing with in the near future.” To know more about this news, check out the official post by GNURadio. GNU C Library version 2.30 releases with POSIX-proposed functions, support for Unicode 12.1.0, new Linux functions and more! GNU APL 1.8 releases with bug fixes, FFT, GTK, RE and more Debian 10 codenamed ‘buster’ released, along with Debian GNU/Hurd 2019 as a port    

Two days ago, Linus Torvalds, the principal developer of the Linux kernel announced the release of Linux 5.3 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml). This major release brings new support for AMD Navi GPUs, the umwait x86 instructions, and Intel speed select. Linux 5.3 also presents a new pidfd_open(2) system call and 16 millions new IPv4 addresses in the 0.0.0.0/8 range. There are also many new drivers and improvements in this release. The previous version, Linux 5.2 was released more than two months ago. It included Sound Open Firmware project, new mount API, improved pressure stall information and more. What’s new in Linux 5.3? pidfd_open(2) system call The PID (process identification number) issue has been present in Linux, for a long time. The Linux 5.1 release had the pidfd_send_signal which allowed processes to send signals to stable ‘pidfd’ handles, even after PID reuse. Linux 5.2 added the CLONE_PIDFD to clone(2) feature which enabled users to create PIDs that were usable with pidfd_send_signal(2). However, this created problems for Android's low memory killer (LMK). Thus, Linux 5.3 has a new pidfd_open(2) syscal to complete the functionality needed to deal with the PID reuse issue. This release also has an added polling support for pidfd to allow process managers to identify when a process dies in a race-free way. Support for AMD Navi GPUs Linux 5.3 provides initial support for the AMD Navi GPUs in the amdgpu driver. The AMD Navi GPUs are the new AMD RX5700 GPUs which became available recently. This release also adds support for the core driver,(DCN2) displays, GFX and compute (GFX10), System DMA (SDMA 5), multimedia decode and encode (VCN2) and power management. Zhaoxin x86 CPU support This release also supports the Zhaoxin x86 Processors. The report states, “The architecture of the ZX family of processors is a continuation of VIA's Centaur Technology x86-64 Isaiah design.” Intel Speed Select support for easier power tuning Linux 5.3 also adds support for Intel Speed Select, which is a feature only supported on specific Xeon servers. The power management technology allows users to configure their servers for throughput and per-core performance settings. The Intel Speed Select enables prioritization of performance for certain workloads running on specific cores. 16 millions of new IPv4 addresses This release makes the 0.0.0.0/8 IPv4 range acceptable by Linux as a valid address range and available for 16 million new IPv4 addresses. The IPv4 address space includes hundreds of millions of addresses which were previously reserved for future use. The new IPv4 Cleanup Project has made the addresses usable now. Utilization clamping support in the task scheduler This release adds utilization clamping support to the task scheduler. This is a refinement of the energy-aware scheduling framework for power-asymmetric systems (like ARM big.LITTLE) added in Linux 5.0. Per-task clamping attributes can be set through sched_setattr(2). This feature intends to replace the hacks that Android had developed to achieve the same result. Improvements in Core Io_uring Added support for recvmsg() Added support for sendmsg() Added support for Submission Queue Entry links. Task scheduler New tracepoints added which will be required for energy-aware scheduling testing CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT It will help the RT patchset to be fully integrated into the mainline kernel in the future merge Improvements in Memory management Smaps: It is used to report separate components for the PSS in smaps_rollup proc file. This will help in tuning the memory manager behavior in consumer devices, particularly for the mobile devices commit. Swap: It uses rbtree for swap_extent instead of a linked list. Thus, it improves swap performance when there are lots of processes accessing the swap device concurrently. Linux developers are happy with the Linux 5.3 features, especially the new support for AMD Navi GPUs. https://twitter.com/NoraDotCodes/status/1173621317033218049 A Redditor comments, “I'm really glad to hear that Linux is catching up to the navi gpus as I just invested in all that and after building a new box in attempting to do GPU pass-through for a straight up Linux host and windows VM realized that things aren't quite there yet.” Another user says, “Looks like some people were eagerly waiting for this release. I'm glad the Linux kernel keeps evolving and improving.” These are some of the selected updates in Linux 5.3. You may go through the release notes for more details. Latest news in Linux A recap of the Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 Lilocked ransomware (Lilu) affects thousands of Linux-based servers IBM open-sources Power ISA and other chips; brings OpenPOWER foundation under the Linux Foundation

Update: On July 23rd, the Enhancements Lead of Kubernetes 1.15 at VMware, Kenny Coleman,  published a “What's New in Kubernetes 1.15” video with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). In the video, he explains in detail about the three new major features in Kubernetes 1.15, which include Dynamic HA Clusters with Kubeadm, Volume Cloning and CustomResourceDefinition (CRDs). Coleman also highlights each feature and explains its importance to users.  Watch the video below to know in detail about Kenny Coleman’s talk about Kubernetes 1.15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7dgHjPpzc On June 19th, the Kubernetes team announced the release of Kubernetes 1.15, which consists of 25 enhancements, including 2 moving to stable, 13 in beta, and 10 in alpha. The key features of this release include extensibility around core Kubernetes APIs, cluster lifecycle stability, and usability improvements. This is Kubernetes’ second release this year. The previous version Kubernetes 1.14, released three months ago, had 10 stable enhancements--the most amount of stable features revealed in a release. In an interview to the New Stack, Claire Laurence, the team lead at Kubernetes said that in this release, “We’ve had a fair amount of features progress to beta. I think what we’ve been seeing a lot with these alpha and beta features as they progress is a lot of continued focus on stability and overall improvement before indicating that those features are stable.” Let’s have a brief look at all the new features and updates. #1 Extensibility around core Kubernetes APIs The theme of the new developments around CustomResourceDefinitions is data consistency and native behavior. The Kubernetes team wants that a user should not notice whether the interaction is with a CustomResource or with a Golang-native resource. Hence, from v1.15 onwards, Kubernetes will check each schema against a restriction called “structural schema”. This enforces non-polymorphic and complete typing of each field in a CustomResource. Out of the five enhancements, the ‘CustomResourceDefinition Defaulting’ is an alpha release. It is specified using the default keyword in the OpenAPI validation schema. Defaulting will be available as alpha in Kubernetes 1.15 for structural schemas. The other four enhancements are in beta which include: CustomResourceDefinition Webhook Conversion In Kubernetes, CustomResourceDefinitions gain the ability to convert between different versions on-the-fly, just like users are used to from native resources for the long term. CustomResourceDefinition OpenAPI Publishing OpenAPI publishing for CRDs will be available with Kubernetes 1.15 as beta, but only for structural schemas. CustomResourceDefinitions Pruning Pruning is the automatic removal of unknown fields in objects sent to a Kubernetes API. A field is unknown if it is not specified in the OpenAPI validation schema. It enforces that only data structures specified by the CRD developer are persisted to etcd. This is the behaviour of native resources, and will be available for CRDs as well, starting as beta in Kubernetes 1.15. Admission Webhook Reinvocation & Improvements In the earlier versions, mutating webhooks were only called once, in alphabetical order. An earlier run webhook cannot react on the output of webhooks, called later in the chain. With Kubernetes 1.15, mutating webhooks can opt-in into at least one re-invocation by specifying reinvocationPolicy: IfNeeded. If a later mutating webhook modifies the object, the earlier webhook will get a second chance. #2 Cluster Lifecycle Stability and Usability Improvements The cluster lifecycle building block, kubeadm, continues to receive features and stability work, which is needed for bootstrapping production clusters efficiently. kubeadm has promoted high availability (HA) capability to beta, allowing users to use the familiar kubeadm init and kubeadm join commands to configure and deploy an HA control plane. With kubeadm, certificate management has become more robust in 1.15, as it seamlessly rotates all the certificates before expiry. The kubeadm configuration file API is moving from v1beta1 to v1beta2 in 1.15. kubeadm now has its own new logo. Continued Improvement of CSI In Kubernetes 1.15, the Special Interests Groups (SIG) Storage enables migration of in-tree volume plugins to Container Storage Interface (CSI). SIG Storage worked on bringing CSI to feature parity with in-tree functionality, including functionality like resizing and inline volumes. SIG Storage introduces new alpha functionality in CSI that doesn’t exist in the Kubernetes Storage subsystem yet, like volume cloning. Volume cloning enables users to specify another PVC as a “DataSource” when provisioning a new volume. If the underlying storage system supports this functionality and implements the “CLONE_VOLUME” capability in its CSI driver, then the new volume becomes a clone of the source volume. Additional feature updates Support for go modules in Kubernetes Core Continued preparation on cloud provider extraction and code organization. The cloud provider code has been moved to kubernetes/legacy-cloud-providers for easier removal later and external consumption. Kubectl get and describe now work with extensions. Nodes now support third party monitoring plugins. A new Scheduling Framework for schedule plugins is now Alpha ExecutionHook API designed to trigger hook commands in the containers for different use cases is now Alpha. These extensions/v1beta1, apps/v1beta1, and apps/v1beta2 APIs will continue to depreciate and eventually will be retired in the next version 1.16. To know about the additional features in detail check out the release notes. https://twitter.com/markdeneve/status/1141135440336039936 https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1141485648412651520 For more details on Kubernetes 1.15, check out Kubernetes blog. HAProxy 2.0 released with Kubernetes Ingress controller, layer 7 retries, polyglot extensibility, gRPC support and more Red Hat releases OpenShift 4 with adaptability, Enterprise Kubernetes and more! Linkerd 2.3 introduces Zero-Trust Networking for Kubernetes