Tech News - Application Development

The team at Gradle has now released Gradle 5.0 after Gradle 4.9 was released in July this year. Gradle 5.0 is faster, safer and more capable than the previous ones. Gradle is a build tool which accelerates developer productivity as it helps teams build, automate and deliver software faster. This tool focuses on build automation and support for multi-language development. Improvements in Gradle 5.0 Gradle 5.0 comes incremental compilation and annotation processing to enhance caching and up-to-date checking. Gradle 5.0 also brings features such as Kotlin DSL, dependency version alignment, version locking, task timeouts, Java 11 support, and more. The Kotlin DSL helps the IDE users in code completion and refactoring. Faster builds with build cache Users can experience faster builds the moment they upgrade to Gradle 5.0. Gradle 5.0 allows developers and business executives to build only what is needed by using the build cache and incremental processing features. The build cache reuses the results of previous executions and makes the process faster. It also reduces the build time by approximately 90%. Incremental Java compilation and annotation processing Gradle 5.0 features an incremental compiler. Now, there is no need for CompileJava tasks to recompile all the source files except for the the first time This compiler is default in this version and is highly optimized. It also supports incremental annotation processing which increases the effectiveness of incremental compilation in the presence of annotation processors. Users have to upgrade to the latest version (5.0) of the processors to experience the annotation processing. The new annotationProcessor configuration is used to manage the annotation processors and for putting them on the annotation processor path. Fine-grained transitive dependency management Gradle 5.0 comes with new features for customizing dependencies and features for improved POM and BOM support. Gradle 5.0 supports dependency constraints that are used to define versions or version ranges to restrict direct and transitive dependency versions. In this version, the platform definitions or Maven BOM dependencies are natively supported which allows the use of Spring Boot platform definition without using an external plugin. The dependency alignment aligns the modules in a logical group. With this release, the dynamic dependency versions can now be locked for better build reproducibility. This version can import bill of materials (BOM) files. Writing Gradle build logic Users can now write Gradle build scripts in Kotlin. The functionality of Static-typing in Kotlin allows tools to provide better IDE assistance to the users. More memory efficient Gradle execution The lower memory requirements and cache cleanup reduces Gradle’s overhead on the system. In Gradle 5.0, many caching mechanisms have been optimized for reducing the default memory for Gradle processes. New Gradle invocation options This version supports JUnit 5: JUnit Platform, JUnit Jupiter, and JUnit Vintage which helps in enabling test grouping and filtering. The tasks for non-interactive environments like continuous integration execution group the log messages. It’s now easy to identify if a test has failed with arich command-line console as it shows a colored build status. One can now work on interdependent projects with the help of composite builds in Gradle 5.0. This release of Gradle supports custom arguments which help in running Java applications faster and easier. New Gradle task and plugin APIs This version of Gradle features a new Worker API for safe parallel and asynchronous execution. Gradle 5.0’s new Configuration Avoidance APIs allow  users to configure projects together. The task timeout API helps to specify a timeout duration for a task, after which it will be interrupted. Custom CLI args in Gradle 5.0 helps the users to configure their custom tasks.   To know more about Gradle 5.0. check out Gradle’s official blog. Gradle 4.9 released! Android Studio 3.2 Beta 5 out, with updated Protobuf Gradle plugin Setting Gradle properties to build a project [Tutorial]

Last week, Microsoft announced the general availability of F# 4.6 and F# tools for Visual Studio 2019. This release comes with a new record type called Anonymous Records and also few updates in the F# Core library. F# 4.6 and F# tools for Visual Studio 2019 For the updates and development of new features in F# 4.6, the team followed an open RFC process. Writing named record types in F# was not really easy in previous versions and to address exactly that a new type is introduced called Anonymous Records. These F# record types do not have any explicit name and can be declared in an ad-hoc fashion. Updates in F# Core library In the F# Core library, updates are made to the 'ValueOption' type. With this release, a new attribute is added called DebuggerDisplay that helps in debugging. The IsNone, IsSome, None, Some, op_Implicit, and ToString members are added. In addition to these updates, there is now a 'ValueOption' module, which has the same functions the Option module has. F# tools for Visual Studio 2019 A lot of focus has been put on improving the performance of F# tools for Visual Studio, especially for larger solutions. Previously, F# compiler and tools struggled when used for larger solutions and caused a lot of memory and CPU usage. To address this problem the team has done few updates in the F# parser, reduced the cache sizes, significantly reduced the allocations when processing format strings, and more. This release also comes with a new feature that intelligently idents pasted code based on where your cursor is. You can use this feature by turning on Smart Indent via Tools > Options > Text Editor > F# > Tabs > Smart this will be on automatically. Read the entire list of updates in F# 4.6 and F# tools for Visual Studio 2019 on Microsoft’s blog. Microsoft releases TypeScript 3.4 with an update for faster subsequent builds, and more Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP share new details about the Open Data Initiative Microsoft introduces Pyright, a static type checker for the Python language written in TypeScript

Today, Sven Efftinge, the Technical Co-founder of Gitpod.io, announced the launch of Gitpod, a cloud IDE that tightly integrates with GitHub. Along with the launch, starting from today, the Gitpod app is also available on GitHub marketplace. What is Gitpod? While working on a project, a lot of time goes into switching contexts between projects and branches, setting up a development environment, or simply waiting for the build to complete. To reduce this time and effort, Gitpod provides developers disposable, ready-to-code development environments for their GitHub projects. What are its advantages? Automatically pre-builts every commit Gitpod, similar to continuous integration tools, automatically pre-builds every commit. So, when you open a Gitpod workspace you will not only find the code and tools ready but also that the build has already finished. Easily go back to previous releases A Gitpod workspace is configured through a .gitpod.yml file written in YAML. This file is versioned with your code, so if at some point, you need to go back to old releases, you can easily do that. Pre-installed VS Code extensions You will get several VS Code extensions pre-installed in Gitpod such as Go support from Microsoft’s own extension. The team plans to add more VS Code extensions in the near future and later developers will be allowed to define any extensions they want. Supports full-featured terminals In addition to supporting one of the best code editors, Gitpod comes with full-featured terminals that are backed by Linux container running in the cloud. So, you get the same command-line tools you would use locally. Better collaboration Gitpod supports two major features for collaboration: Sharing running workspaces: This feature allows you to share a workspace with a remote colleague. It comes handy when you want to hunt down a bug together or do some pair programming. Snapshots: With this feature, you can take an immutable copy of your dev environment at any point in time and share the link wherever you want. Users will receive an exact clone of the environment including all state and even UI layout. How you can use Gitpod? For creating a workspace you have two options: You can prefix any GitHub URL with gitpod.io/#. You can also use the Gitpod browser extension available for Chrome and Firefox users, which adds a button to GitHub that does the prefixing for you. You can watch the following video to know exactly how Gitpod works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D41zSHJthZI Read more in detail on Gitpod’s official website. Introducing git/fs: A native git client for Plan 9 ‘Developers’ lives matter’: Chinese developers protest over the “996 work schedule” on GitHub Sublime Text 3.2 released with Git integration, improved themes, editor control and much more!

Wine 4.0 stable version has been released yesterday. It comes with four main features including support for Vulkan, Direct3D 12, Game controllers and High-DPI support on Android. In total, there are over 6,000 individual changes and improvements. Wine is an implementation of the Windows Application Programming Interface (API) library. makes it possible to run Windows programs alongside Linux or any other Unix-like operating system. Wine can also be used to recompile a program into a format that Linux can understand more easily, though access to the Windows program source code is required. Major improvements in Wine 4.0 Direct3D 12 support Wine 4.0 provides initial support for Direct3D 12 and requires the vkd3d library and a Vulkan-capable graphics card. The Direct3D graphics card database recognizes more graphics cards. The Multi-Threaded Command Stream feature is enabled by default. The OpenGL core contexts are always used by default when available to all graphics cards, and all versions of Direct3D before 12. Several Direct3D 11 interfaces have been updated to version 11.2, and DXGI interfaces have been updated to version 1.6. Support for using the correct swap interval is implemented, for both DXGI and DirectDraw applications. Application-configurable frame latency is implemented for Direct3D 9Ex and DXGI applications. Vulkan Support In Wine 4.0, Vulkan driver is implemented, using the host Vulkan libraries under X11, or MoltenVK on macOS. Wine 4.0 also provides a built-in vulkan-1 loader as an alternative to the SDK loader. A number of Direct2D interfaces have been updated to version 1.2. Other features: ARGB visual can be used as default X11 visual. The old 16-bit DIB.DRV driver is implemented using the DIB engine. For large polygons, polygon drawing is much faster in the DIB engine. Improvements made in Kernel Support for running DOS binaries under Wine is removed. In wine 4.0, all the CPU control and debug registers can be accessed by kernel drivers, including on 64-bit. Events, semaphores, mutexes, and timers are also implemented in kernel mode for device drivers. The WaitOnAddress synchronization primitives are supported. Application settings, compatibility information, and execution levels are also recognized in application manifests. Other changes Wine 4.0 supports the new version of the Android graphics buffer allocator API to enable graphics support on Android version 8 and above. Android x86-64 platforms are supported also in 64-bit mode. New external dependencies The Vulkan library is used to implement the Vulkan graphics driver. The Vkd3d library is used to implement Direct3D 12 on top of Vulkan. The SDL library is used to support game controllers. The GSSAPI library is used to implement Kerberos authentication. These are a select few changes. For a full list of improvements and additions, check out the release notes. Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta; deprecates Btrfs filesystem Homebrew 1.9.0 released with periodic brew cleanup, beta support for Linux, Windows and more. Microsoft releases ProcDump for Linux, a Linux version of the ProcDump Sysinternals tool

Last week, the team behind GraalVM announced the release of GraalVM 19.0. This is the first production release, which comes with early adopter Windows support, class initialization update in GraalVM Native Image, Java 8 SE compliant Java Virtual Machine, and more. https://twitter.com/graalvm/status/1126607204860289024 GraalVM is a polyglot virtual machine that allows users to run applications written in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, R, JVM-based languages like Java, Scala, Kotlin, Clojure, and LLVM-based languages such as C and C++. Updates in GraalVM 19.0 GraalVM Native Image GraalVM Native Image is responsible for compiling Java code ahead-of-time to a standalone executable called a native image. Currently, it is available as an early adopter plugin and you can install it by executing the ‘gu install native-image’ command. With this release, Native Image is updated in how classes are initialized in a native-image. The application classes are now initialized at runtime by default and all the JDK classes are initialized at the build time. This change was made to improve user experience, as it eliminates the need to write substitutions and to deal with instances of unsupported classes ending up in the image heap. Early adopter Windows support With this release, early adopter builds for Windows users are also made available. These builds include the JDK with the GraalVM compiler enabled, Native Image capabilities, and GraalVM’s JavaScript engine and the developer tools. Java 8 SE compliant Java VM This release comes with Java 8 SE compliant Java Virtual Machine, which is based on OpenJDK 1.8.0_212. Read also: No more free Java SE 8 updates for commercial use after January 2019 Node.js with polyglot capabilities This release comes with Node.js with polyglot capabilities, based on Node.js 10.15.2. With these capabilities, you will be able to leverage Java or Scala libraries from Node.js and also use Node.js modules in Java applications. JavaScript engine compliant with ECMAScript 2019 GraalVM 19.0 comes with JavaScript engine compliant with the latest ECMAScript 2019 standard. You can now migrate from JavaScript engines Rhino or Nashorn, which are no longer maintained, to GraalVM’s JavaScript engine compatible with the latest standards. Check out the GraalVM 19.0 release notes for more details. OpenJDk team’s detailed message to NullPointerException and explanation in JEP draft Introducing Node.js 12 with V8 JavaScript engine, improved worker threads, and much more What’s new in ECMAScript 2018 (ES9)?

Last week, a new traffic analysis framework, Netcap (NETwork CAPture) was released. It converts a stream of network packets into accessible type-safe structured data for representing specific protocols or custom abstractions. https://twitter.com/dreadcode/status/1076267396577533952 This project was implemented in Go programming language that provides a garbage collected memory safe runtime as parsing of untrusted input could be dangerous. It was developed for a series of experiments like filtering, dataset labeling, encoding, error logging, etc in the thesis: Implementation and evaluation of secure and scalable anomaly-based network intrusion detection. The Netcap project won the second place at Kaspersky Labs SecurIT Cup 2018 in Budapest. Why was Netcap introduced? Corporate communication networks are attacked frequently with previously unseen malware or insider threats, which makes defense mechanisms such as anomaly-based intrusion detection systems necessary for detecting security incidents. The signature-based and anomaly detection strategies rely on features extracted from the network traffic that requires secure and extensible collection strategies. The solutions that are available are written in low-level system programming languages that require manual memory management and suffer from vulnerabilities that allow a remote attacker to disable the network monitor. Others lack in terms of flexibility and data availability. To tackle these problems and ease future experiments with anomaly-based detection techniques, Netcap was released. Netcap uses Google's protocol buffers for encoding its output which helps in accessing it across a wide range of programming languages. The output can also be emitted as comma separated values, which is a common input format for data analysis tools and systems. Netcap is extensible and it provides multiple ways of adding support for new protocols and also implements the parsing logic in a memory safe way. It provides high dimensional data of observed traffic and allows the researcher to focus on new approaches for detecting malicious behavior in network environments, instead of opting data collection mechanisms and post-processing steps. It features a concurrent design that makes use of multi-core architectures. This command-line tool focuses on usability and readability and displays progress when processing packets. Why Go? Go, commonly referred to as Golang, is a statically typed programming language which was released by Google in 2009. Netcap opted Go as its syntax is similar to the C programming language and also has a lot of adopted ideas from other languages, such as Python and Erlang. It is commonly used for network programming and backend implementation. With Go Netcap can compile faster and generate statically linked binaries, easily. Goroutine, an asynchronous process is multiplexed onto threads of the OS as required. In case a goroutine blocks, the corresponding OS thread blocks as well, but the other goroutines aren’t affected. So, this proves to be helpful in Netcap as it doesn’t disturb the functioning. Also, Goroutines are less expensive as compared to a thread and allocate resources dynamically as needed. Since, Go offers channels as a lightweight way to communicate between goroutines, the synchronization and messaging process gets easier in Netcap. Design Goals of Netcap Netcap provides memory safety when parsing untrusted input. It features ease of extension. The output format is interoperable with many different programming languages. It features concurrent design. It comes with output with small storage footprint on disk. It provides with maximum data availability. It allows implementation of custom abstractions It comes with a rich platform and architecture support Future Scope Future development on Netcap will focus on increasing the unit test coverage and performance critical operations. The output of Netcap will be compared to other tools, to ensure no data is missed or misinterpreted. Netcap will be extended in future with functionalities like support for extracted features. This framework might be used for experiments on datasets for accurate predictions on network data. Encoding feature vectors could also be implemented as part of the Netcap framework. An interface for adding additional application layer encoders can be added in future. Netcap will be evaluated for monitoring industrial control systems communication. The recently open sourced fingerprinting strategy for SSH handshakes (HASSH) by salesforce could prove beneficial in future. Check the slides of this project from the presentation by Philipp Mieden (the creator of Netcap) at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities on Researchgate. Many users are appreciating the efforts taken for this project and eagerly awaiting for the features that might be released in the future. But a few Hacker News users think that the functionality provided by this application is still unclear. The thesis misses a lot of points with the major one being as to how this tool is actually warranted as a whole. The question is as to how will the anomalies of this project get detected? A lot of questions are still unanswered but it would be interesting to see what Philipp comes up with next. https://twitter.com/mythicalcmd/status/1076459582963310593 Stanford researchers introduce DeepSolar, a deep learning framework that mapped every solar panel in the US Netflix adopts Spring Boot as its core Java framework Facebook open-sources PyText, a PyTorch based NLP modeling framework

Last month, Square a financial services and mobile payment company updated its terms of service effective from this year in July. Developers are raising concerns upon one of the terms of service which restricts the use of AGPL-licensed software in online stores. What is GNU AGPL Affero General Public License The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is a free and copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. AGPL guarantees the freedom for sharing and changing all versions of a program. It protects developers’ right by asserting copyright on the software, and by giving legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software. What does the developer community think about AGPL The Content Restrictions section B-15  under the Online Store, reads, “You will not use, under any circumstance, any open source software subject to the GNU Affero General Public License v.3, or greater.” Few of the developers think that Square has misunderstood AGPL and this rule doesn’t make sense to them. A user commented on HackerNews, “This makes absolutely no sense. I'm almost certain that Square lawyers fucked up big time. They looked at the AGPL and completely misunderstood the context. There is no way in hell anyone can interpret AGPL in a way that makes Square responsible for any license violations their customers make selling software.” While according to few others the code which is licensed under AGPL can’t be used in a website hosted by Square, is what the rule means. Also, if the AGPL code is used by Square then the code might be sent to the browsers along with Square’s own proprietary code. And this could possibly mean that Square has violated AGPL. But a lot of companies follow the same rule, including Google, which clearly states, “WARNING: Code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) MAY NOT be used at Google.”  But this could be useful for the developers as it keeps the code safe from the big tech companies using it. Chris DiBona, Director of open source at Google, said in a statement to The Register that “Google continues to ban the lightning-rod AGPL open source license within the company because doing so "saves engineering time" and because most AGPL projects are of no use to the company.” According to him, AGPL is designed for closing the "application service provider loophole" in the GPL and which lets ASPs use GPL code without distributing their changes back to the open source community. Under the AGPL, one has to open source their code if they use the AGPL code in their web service, and why would a company like Google do that? As its core components and back-end infrastructure that run its online services are not open source. But it also seems that it is something that needs the interference of lawyers and it is a matter of concern for them as well. https://twitter.com/MarkKriegsman/status/1136589805024923649 Also, the websites using AGPL code might have to provide the entire source code to their back end system. So, few think that AGPL is not an efficient license and they would want to see a better one that goes with the idea of freedom completely. And according to them such licenses should come from copyleft folks and not from the profit-oriented companies. While the rest argue that it is an efficient license and is useful for the developers and giving them enough freedom to share and protecting their software from companies. https://twitter.com/MarkKriegsman/status/1136589799341600769 https://twitter.com/mikeym0p/status/1136392884306010112 https://twitter.com/kjjaeger/status/1136633898526490624 https://twitter.com/fuzzychef/status/1136386203756818433 To know more about this news, check out the post by Square. AWS announces Open Distro for Elasticsearch licensed under Apache 2.0 Blue Oak Council publishes model license version 1.0.0 to simplify software licensing for everyone Red Hat drops MongoDB over concerns related to its Server Side Public License (SSPL)  

On Wednesday, Ori Bernstein, a software engineer at Google, shared details about the Git client he has implemented for Plan 9, a non-posix system. The client named git/fs is implemented in Plan 9 flavor C and comes with tools for writing repository contents. Why git/fs is being introduced? This is the first time someone has implemented a Git client for Plan 9. The upstream Git uses a large number of system calls that are not supported in Plan 9. Bernstein came up with this client to enable working with git repositories without having to clone the git interface directly. Git/fs structure Git/fs provides read-only access to scripts via a file system mounted on ‘/mnt/git’. You will find the following content in ‘/mnt/git’: /mnt/git/object: This includes the objects in the repo. /mnt/git/branch: This includes the branches in the repo. /mnt/git/ctl: This is a file showing the status of the repo. /mnt/git/HEAD: This is an alias for the currently checked out commit directory. You can directly access the repository from the shell using standard tools. The scripts and binaries will manipulate the repository contents directly and the changes done will be immediately mirrored in the filesystem. To improve user experience, the author has put more focus on building a consistent and minimalist interface that supports the necessary functionality. Git/fs does not have any concept of the staging area. There are only three states that files can be in namely, ‘untracked', 'dirty', and 'committed'. To do the tracking it uses empty files under .git/index9/{removed,tracked}/path/to/file. The client is currently hosted in Mercurial, a distributed revision-control tool, as it is the current native plan 9 version control system. To know more detail about Git/fs, head over to its Bitbucket repository. Chris Dickinson on how to implement Git in Rust ‘Developers’ lives matter’: Chinese developers protest over the “996 work schedule” on GitHub Sublime Text 3.2 released with Git integration, improved themes, editor control and much more!  

Yesterday, the team at Netlify announced the new Netlify Dev for local testing and live stream preview capabilities. Web developers can now locally test serverless functions, API integrations, and CDN Logic; thus promoting instant progress sharing.. They can now have access to capabilities of the Netlify platform on their laptops which means they no longer have to wait for staging or production to test and get feedback on their websites and applications. Developers can live-stream their development server to a cloud URL and share updates as the code and content changes. In a statement to Business Wire, Kent C. Dodds, software engineer and educator, said, “Netlify has a knack for simplifying things that are hard so I can focus on building my web application, and Netlify Dev is another example of that. “I'm excited about being able to simply develop, test, and debug my Netlify web applications with one simple command.” Netlify has compiled its entire edge redirect engine into WebAssembly so developers can locally test before deploying to production. They can now write and validate AWS Lambda functions in the Netlify CLI using modern JavaScript and also deploy them as full API endpoints. Mathias Biilmann, CEO, said, “Netlify is obsessed with developer productivity for building modern sites on the JAMstack. The new local test and share capabilities of Netlify Dev provide a single, simplified workflow that brings everything together—from the earliest code to production global deployment. Netlify Dev can automatically detect common tools like Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll, React Static, Eleventy and more. It also provides a single development server and workflow. New and existing users can use Netlify Dev by installing or updating the Netlify CLI for creating new sites, setting up continuous deployment and for pushing new deployments. The new features of Netlify Dev are tightly coupled with Netlify's git-based workflow for team collaboration. Netlify brings an instant CI/CD pipeline for the developers who work in Git so that every commit and pull request can build the site into a deploy preview. Developers can easily build and collaborate in the full production environment. To know more about this news, check out Netlify’s official page. Netlify raises $30 million for a new ‘Application Delivery Network’, aiming to replace servers and infrastructure management Introducing Gitpod, a one-click IDE for GitHub IPv6 support to be automatically rolled out for most Netify Application Delivery Network users  

On Wednesday, Don Ho, Notepad++ developer announced the release of Notepad++ 7.6.4. He also shared that from this release onwards, users will not see the blue-trusted User Access Control (UAC) popup as Notepad++ has dropped code signing for its releases. UAC is a Windows security feature which helps prevent unauthorized changes to operating systems. Why Notepad++ decided to drop code-signing for its releases? DigiCert, a US-based X.509 SSL certificate authority, donated a three years code signing certificate to Notepad++ in 2016, which has now expired. Now when Don Ho was trying to repurchase a new certificate from Certum, a Certification Authority, he was required to mention a Common Name (CN). The problem here is that as Notepad++ is not a company or organization, Certum did not allow him to use Notepad++ as CN. Additionally, he also feels that these code-signing certificates are too overpriced. He added in the blog post, “Notepad++ has done without a certificate for more than 10 years, I don’t see why I should add the dependency now (and be an accomplice of this overpricing industry). I decide to do without it.” This sparked a discussion on Hacker News, and many users supported the developer’s decision. One of the users commented, “Well I don't care if the developer paid the certificate, and I don't see why someone that develops FOSS should pay money for something that doesn't bring to him any of that money back. At least for open source software certificates should be offered for free, in my opinion.” Don Ho mentioned in the announcement that this decision will not have any effect on Notepad++ security whatsoever, but it will be less flexible from before: As always, every release will come with SHA256 hash of the installed and other packages. The SHA256 hash of all components such as ‘SciLexer.dll’, ‘GUP.exe’, and ‘nppPluginList.dll’ will be checked by Notepad++ Markdown support was planned to land in Notepad++ 7.6.3 version, but the needed file wasn’t deployed correctly by the installer. This bug is now fixed in Notepad++ 7.6.4. Additionally, this release fixes a few vulnerable issues and some crash bugs identified in the European Commission's Free and Open Source Software Auditing Bug Bounty program. To read the original announcement, visit Notepad++’s official website. EU to sponsor bug bounty programs for 14 open source projects from January 2019 Browser based Visualization made easy with the new P5.js 5 Reasons to learn programming

Yesterday, the team behind JuliaDiffeEq released DifferentialEquations.jl v6.4.0,  a suite for numerically solving differential equations in Julia. This release gives users the ability to use ODE solvers on GPU, with automated tooling for faster broadcast, matrix-free Newton-Krylov, better Jacobian re-use algorithms, memory use reduction, etc. What’s new in DifferentialEquations.jl v6.4.0? Full GPU support in ODE solvers With this release, the stiff ODE solvers allow expensive calculations, like those in neural ODEs or PDE discretizations, and utilize GPU acceleration. This release also allows the initial condition to be a GPUArray where the internal methods don’t perform any indexing in order to allow for all computations to take place on the GPU without data transfers. Fast DiffEq-Specific Broadcast This release comes with a broadcast wrapper that allows all sorts of information to be passed to the compiler in the differential equation solver’s internals. This makes a bunch of no-aliasing and sizing assumptions that are normally not possible. This leads the internals to use a special @..,which also turns out to be faster than standard loops. Smart linsolve defaults This release comes with a smarter linsolve defaults, which automatically detects the BLAS installation and utilizes RecursiveFactorizations.jl that speeds up the process for ODE. Users can use the linear solver to automatically switch to a form that works for sparse Jacobians. Even banded matrices and Jacobians on the GPU are now automatically handled. Automated J*v Products via Autodifferentiation Users can now use GMRES, easily without the need for constructing the full Jacobian matrix. Users can simply use the directional derivatives in the direction of v in order to compute J*v. Performance improvement With this release, the performance of all implicit methods like KenCarp4 has been improved. DiffEqBiological.jl can now handle large reaction networks and can parse the networks much faster and can build Jacobians that utilize sparse matrices. Though there is still plenty of room for improvement. Partial Neural ODEs This release comes with a lot of improvements and gives a glimpse of working examples of partial neural differential equations that are equations, which have pre-specified portions. These equations allow for batched data and GPU acceleration. Memory optimization  This release comes with memory optimizations of low-memory Runge-Kutta methods for hyperbolic or advection-dominated PDEs. These methods now have a minimal number of registers which are required for the method. Large PDE discretizations can now make use of DifferentialEquations.jl without loss of memory efficiency. Robust callbacks The team has introduced the ContinuousCallback implementation in this release that has increased robustness in double event detection. To know more about this news, check out the official announcement. The solvers – these great unknown Moving Further with NumPy Modules How to build an options trading web app using Q-learning  

Visual Studio Code 1.29 was released yesterday - this was the October update of Microsoft’s planned monthly updates. This update to the code editor includes multiline search, and improved support for macOS. Features of Visual Studio Code 1.29 Multiline search Visual Studio Code now supports multiline search. A regex search executes in multiline mode only if it contains a \n literal. The search view pops up a hint next to each multiline match. The ripgrep tool helps in implementing multiline search. macOS full-screen support To enable full-screen mode for Visual Studio Code, window.nativeFullScreen is set to false. Visual Studio 1.29 has an advantage of entering full-screen mode without creating a macOS space on the desktop. By default, Visual Studio Code uses macOS native full screen. Highlight modified tabs Visual Studio Code 1.29 comes with a new setting workbench.editor.highlightModifiedTabs.  Whenever the editor has unsaved changes, then this new setting displays a thick border at the top of editor tabs. It makes easier to find files that need to be saved. Even the color of the border can be customized. File and folder icons in IntelliSense The IntelliSense widget is now updated. It shows file and folder icons for file completions based on the File Icon theme. This provides a unique look which helps in quickly identifying the different file types. Format Selection With Visual Studio Code 1.29, it is now possible to speed up the small formatting operations. Without an editor selection, the Format Selection command will now format the current line. Show error codes This editor of this version, now shows the error code of a problem if an error code is defined. One can check the error code at the end of the line in square brackets. Normalized extension samples The Visual Studio Code extension samples at vscode-extension-samples have been updated in this release for consistency. Each extension sample includes a uniform coding style and structure and a README that explains the sample's functionality with a short animation. It also includes a listing of the vscode API or Contribution Points used in each sample. Start debugging with a stop on entry The team at Visual Studio Code has introduced a command for Node.js debugging. The command, Debug: Start Debugging and Stop On Entry(extension.node-debug.startWithStopOnEntry) is used for debugging and immediately stopping on the entry of your program. Clear terminal before executing the task A new property called clear got added to the task presentation configuration in this release. If the clear property is set to true then it is possible to clear the terminal before the task is run. Major Bug Fixes Previously, the startDebugging method in Visual Studio Code used to return the value ‘true’ even when the build failed. This issue has been fixed in this release. In previous releases, the Settings UI never used to remember its search on reloading. But with this release, this issue has been resolved. Earlier it wasn't possible to cancel a debug session while it was initializing. But now it’s possible with Visual Studio Code 1.29. Read more on this news on the Visual Studio Code website. Visual Studio code July 2018 release, version 1.26 is out! Unit Testing in .NET Core with Visual Studio 2017 for better code quality Neuron: An all-inclusive data science extension for Visual Studio

Last week, the WaveMaker team released its enhanced platform, WaveMaker 10. This version comes with an advanced technology stack leveraging Angular 7, integrated artifact repository, IDE synchronization features, and more. WaveMaker is an application platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) software that allows developers to rapidly build and run custom apps. It enables developers to build extensible and customizable apps with standard enterprise-grade technologies. The platform also comes with built-in templates, layouts, themes, and widgets to help you build responsive apps without having to write any code. Key enhancements in WaveMaker 10 Improved application stack with Angular 7 and Kubernetes support Developers can now leverage Angular 7 to build responsive web and mobile apps. Angular 7 support provides greater performance and efficiency, type safety, and modern user experience. Scaling applications with Kubernetes is supported via a 1-click deployment feature. You can now natively pack your apps as containers and deploy them to a running Kubernetes cluster. Enhanced developer productivity and collaboration To give developers more control over their code and help them build apps faster, WaveMaker 10 comes with enhanced IDE support. With the newly introduced workspace sync plugin, developers can pull code changes seamlessly between WaveMaker and any IDE without having to manually export and import them. To allow developers to share reusable application elements like service prefabs, templates, themes, and data models, an integrated artifact repository is introduced. The platform can now be localized in a regional language enabling better collaboration between global development teams. Increased enterprise security and accessibility Support for configuring and implementing role-based access at both platform and project levels is introduced in WaveMaker 10. You can now create multiple developer personas with unique permission sets. Open ID authentications for Single Sign-On (SSO) are supported by both the platform and applications built using it. Additionally, all WaveMaker 10 applications are protected from OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities to ensure greater security against threats and malicious injections. Applications built with WaveMaker 10 also support Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, making them more accessible to users with disabilities. Head over to WaveMaker’s official website to know more in detail. Angular 7 is now stable Introducing Alpha Support for Volume Snapshotting in Kubernetes 1.12 Kubernetes 1.12 released with general availability of Kubelet TLS Bootstrap, support for Azure VMSS

BMW has open-sourced its code to RAMSES ( Rendering Architecture for Multi-Screen EnvironmentS) under the GENIVI in-vehicle infotainment alliance. The code is under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and will be useful to developers interested in distributed 3D rendering. RAMSES implements a distributed system for rendering 3D content with a focus on ensuring high performance in terms of bandwidth and resource consumption. According to KTelegram, RAMSES is designed to optimize the rendering of content from the entertainment systems, containing several screens. It is a layer that applies a client-server model for the rendering. One process generates the 3D content and the other process is engaged in its rendering. Rendering can be performed on another device or in a virtual environment.  RAMSES provides piping around existing OpenGL implementations and supports different versions of OpenGL (OpenGL ES 3.0+, OpenGL 4.2, 4.5, etc.) RAMSES also provides its own low-level API which encapsulates and packages the commands and resources to minimize traffic between the client and the server. This allows the transmission of high-quality 3D content over conventional networks for display, without delays and gaps. Google open sources Filament – a physically based rendering engine for Android, Windows, Linux and macOS Facebook releases DeepFocus, an AI-powered rendering system to make virtual reality more Real Meet Carlo, a web rendering surface for Node applications by the Google Chrome team

The Sourcegraph team announced that they’re making Sourcegraph, a self-hosted code search and navigation engine, available as open source, earlier this week. “We opened up Sourcegraph to bring code search and intelligence to more developers and developer ecosystems—and to help us realize the Sourcegraph master plan,” writes Quinn Slack on the announcement page. This Sourcegraph master plan involves making basic code intelligence ubiquitous (for every language, and in every editor, code host, etc.). It wants to focus on making code review continuous and intelligent. Additionally, they also hope to increase the amount and quality of open-source code. Sourcegraph comprises the following features: Instant Code Search: Fast global code search with a hybrid backend. This combines a trigram index with in-memory streaming. You can search in files and diffs in your code by just using simple terms, regular expressions, and other filters. Code intelligence: It offers code intelligence for many languages using the Language Server Protocol. It also makes browsing code and finding references on your code easier. Data Center: Once you grow to hundreds or thousands of users and repositories, you can graduate from the single-server deployment to a highly scalable cluster using the Sourcegraph Data Center. Integrations: It offers Integration with third-party developer tools via the Sourcegraph Extension API. Organizations that are already using the Sourcegraph navigation engine can upgrade to Sourcegraph Enterprise (previously called Data Center) to get a hand on features that large organizations need such as single sign-on, backups, and recovery, cluster deployment, etc. However, these additional features that come with the Enterprise edition are paid and not open source. “We're also excited about what this means for Sourcegraph as a company. All of our customers, many with hundreds or thousands of developers using Sourcegraph internally every day, started out with a single developer spinning up a Sourcegraph instance and sharing it with their team. Being open-source makes it even easier to start using Sourcegraph in that way”, explained the announcement page. For more information, check out the official announcement. Facebook open sources LogDevice, a distributed data store for logs Kong 1.0 launches: the only open source API platform specifically built for microservices, cloud, and serverless Uber’s Marmaray, an Open Source Data Ingestion and Dispersal Framework for Apache Hadoop