Tech News - Application Development

Similar to the npm registry, RubyGems, and Docker Hub, GitHub also introduced its own package management service called GitHub Package Registry in May this year. After gathering community feedback, the team yesterday announced that the service now has proxy support for the primary npm registry. Also, the feature that created a release whenever you published a package is now removed. GitHub Package Registry and its features GitHub Package Registry allows you to host packages publicly or privately and code in one place. It provides you an end-to-end DevOps workflow consisting of your code, Continuous Integration (CI), and deployment solutions by integrating with GitHub APIs, GitHub Actions, and Webhooks. There are a number of features that GitHub Package Registry comes with. It inherits the permissions and visibility associated with the repository. This unified permissions management relieves organizations from maintaining a separate package registry and mirror permissions across systems. GitHub Package Registry gives you an insight into packages by providing data such as download statistics, version history, and more. It also supports multi-format packages so you can host multiple software package types in one registry. Read also: GitHub announces the beta version of GitHub Package Registry, its new package management service Proxy support for the primary npm registry With the npm.js proxy support, developers will be able to set the GitHub Package Registry as the source of their organization’s npm packages and the proxied source of packages from npm. To use this feature you just need to change OWNER to your GitHub organization or username in your project’s ‘.npmrc’ file. This will instruct npm to redirect all package requests to GitHub Package Registry, which will then serve any requests for a package in your account. In the future, the team plans to expand this feature to support other npm sources as well and add proxy support for other package types including Maven, NuGet, and Ruby. In order to prevent outages, they also plan to build a permanent cache on top of the proxy service. Another update is that the feature that automatically created releases when you published a package, is now removed. Explaining the reason, the team wrote in the announcement, “Many customers expressed that automatically creating a release for every package published was unexpected and undesirable and that it led to conflicts for repositories that were managing their releases closely already. As of today, publishing a package will no longer create an accompanying release.” The service is currently available in a limited public beta. GitHub is planning to make the service generally available via GitHub Universe later this year. Till then, it seeks for your feedback through the GitHub Package Registry survey. You can read the official announcement to know more in detail. Other news in programming Core Python team confirms sunsetting Python 2 on January 1, 2020 Developers from the Swift for TensorFlow project propose adding first-class differentiable programming to Swift Go 1.13 releases with error wrapping, TLS 1.3 enabled by default, improved number literals, and more

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the preview of Remote Development extension pack for VS Code to enable developers to use a container, remote machine, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a full-featured development environment. https://twitter.com/code/status/1124016109076799488 Currently, developers will need to use the Insiders build for remote development until the stable version is available. The Insiders builds are the versions that are shipped daily with latest features and bug fixes. Why these VS Code extensions are needed? Developers often choose containers or remote virtual machines configured with specific development and runtime stacks as their development environment. This is an optimal choice because configuring such development environments locally could be too difficult or sometimes even impossible. Data scientists also require remote environments to do their work efficiently. They build and train data models and to do that they need to analyze large datasets. This demands massive storage and compute service, which a local machine can hardly provide. One option to solve this problem is using Remote Desktop but it can be sometimes laggy. Developers often use Vim and SSH or local tools with file synchronization, but these can also be slow and error-prone. There are browser-based tools that can be used in some scenarios, but they lack the richness and familiarity that desktop tools provide. VS Code Remote Development extensions pack Looking at these challenges, the VS Code team came up with a solution that suggested that VS Code should run in two places at once. One instance will run the developer tools locally and the other will connect to a set of development services running remotely in the context of a physical or virtual machine. Following are three extensions for working with remote workspaces: Remote-WSL Remote - WSL allows you to use WSL as a full development environment directly from VS Code. It runs commands and extensions directly in WSL so developers don’t have to think about pathing issues, binary compatibility, or other cross-OS challenges. With this extension, developers will be able to edit files located in WSL or the mounted Windows filesystem and also run and debug Linux-based applications on Windows. Remote-SSH Remote - SSH allows you to open folders or workspaces hosted on any remote machine, VM, or container with a running SSH server. It directly runs commands and other extensions on the remote machine so you don’t need to have the source code on your local machine. It enables you to use larger, faster, or more specialized hardware than your local machine. You can also quickly switch between different remote development environments and safely make updates. Remote-Containers Remote - Containers allows you to use a Docker container as your development container. It starts or attaches to a development container, which is running a well-defined tool and runtime stack. All your workspace files are copied or cloned into the container, or mounted from the local file system. To configure the development container you can use a ‘devcontainer.json’ file. To read more in detail, visit Microsoft’s official website. Docker announces collaboration with Microsoft’s .NET at DockerCon 2019 Microsoft and GitHub employees come together to stand with the 996.ICU repository Microsoft employees raise their voice against the company’s misogynist, sexist and racist acts  

Yesterday, Google announced the general availability of a new API for Google Docs that will help developers to automate their tasks that users manually do in the company’s online office suite. This API lets users read and write documents programmatically so that users can integrate data from various sources. Since Google Cloud Next 2018, this API has been in developer preview and is now available to all developers. This API lets users automate processes, create documentation in bulk and generate invoices or contracts. With this API, developers can set up processes that manipulate documents. It gives the ability to insert, move, delete, merge and format text, insert inline images and work with lists. Zapier, Netflix, Mailchimp and Final Draft are some of the companies that built solutions based on the new API during the preview period. Zapier integrated the Docs API into its workflow automation tool for helping users to create offer letters based on a template. Netflix used it to build an internal tool that allows its engineers to gather data and automate its documentation workflow. This API will help the users to regularly create similar documents with changing order numbers and line items based on information from third-party systems. The API’s import/export abilities help users for using the Docs for internal content management systems. Few users are happy with this news and excited to use the API. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “That is such great work. Getting the job done with the tools already around is just such a good feeling.” Whereas, few others think that it will take some time for Google to reach where Microsoft is now. Another comment reads, “They will have a lot of catchup to do to get where Office is now. I'm frankly amazed by how good Microsoft Flow has been.” Another user commented, “Microsoft Flow is a really powerful - in terms of advanced capabilities it offers.” To know more about this news, check out Google’s official post. Apple and Google slammed by Human Rights groups for hosting Absher, a Saudi app that tracks women Youtube promises to reduce recommendations of ‘conspiracy theory’. Ex-googler explains why this is a ‘historic victory’ Google’s Adiantum, a new encryption standard for lower-end phones and other smart devices

Yesterday, the team behind iTerm2, the GPL-licensed terminal emulator for macOS, announced the release of iTerm2 3.3.0. It is a major release with many new features such as the new Python scripting API, a new scriptable status bar, two new themes, and more. iTerm2 is a successor to iTerm and works on all macOS. It is an open source replacement for Apple's Terminal and is highly customizable as comes with a lot of useful features. Major highlights in iTerm2 3.3.0 A new Python scripting API which can control iTerm2 and extend its behavior has been added. It allows users to write Python scripts easily, thus enabling them to do extensive configuration and customization in iTerm2 3.3.0. A new scriptable status bar has been added with 13 built-in configurable components. iTerm2 3.3.0 comes with two new themes. The first theme is called as Minimal and it helps reducing visual cluster. The second theme can move tabs into the title bar, thus saving space while maintaining the general appearance of a macOS app and is called Compact. Other new features in iTerm2 3.3.0 The session, tab and window titles have been given a new appearance to make it more flexible and comprehensible. It is now possible to configure these titles separately and also to select what type of information it shows per profile. These titles are integrated with the new Python scripting API. The tabs title has new icons, which either indicates a running app or a fixed icon per profile. A new tool belt called ‘Actions’ has been introduced in iTerm2 3.3.0. It provides shortcuts  to frequent actions like sending a snippet of a text. A new utility ‘it2git’ which allows the git status bar component to show git state on a remote host, has been added. New support for crossed-out text (SGR 9) and automatically restarting a session when it ends has also been added in iTerm2 3.3.0. Other Improvements in iTerm2 3.3.0 Many visual improvements Updated app icon Various pages of preferences have been rearranged to make it more visually appealing The password manager can be used to enter a password securely A new option to log Automatic Profile Switching messages to the scripting console has been added The long scrollback history’s performance has been improved Users love the new features in iTerm2 3.3.0 release, specially the new Python API, the scriptable status bar and the new Minimal mode. https://twitter.com/lambdanerd/status/1157004396808552448 https://twitter.com/alloydwhitlock/status/1156962293760036865 https://twitter.com/josephcs/status/1157193431162036224 https://twitter.com/dump/status/1156900168127713280 A user on Hacker News comments, “First off, wow love the status bar idea.” Another user on Hacker News says “Kudos to Mr. Nachman on continuing to develop a terrific piece of macOS software! I've been running the 3.3 betas for a while and some of the new functionality is really great. Exporting a recording of a terminal session from the "Instant Replay" panel is very handy!” Few users are not impressed with iTerm2 3.3.0 features and are comparing it with the Terminal app. A comment on Hacker News reads, “I like having options but wouldn’t recommend iTerm. Apple’s Terminal.app is more performant rendering text and more responsive to input while admittedly having somewhat less unnecessary features. In fact, iTerm is one of the slowest terminals out there! iTerm used to have a lot of really compelling stuff that was missing from the official terminal like tabs, etc that made straying away from the canonical terminal app worth it but most of them eventually made their way to Terminal.app so nowadays it’s mostly just fluff.” For the full list of improvements in iTerm2 3.3.0, visit the iTerm2 changelog page. Apple previews macOS Catalina 10.15 beta, featuring Apple music, TV apps, security, zsh shell, driverKit, and much more! WWDC 2019 highlights: Apple introduces SwiftUI, new privacy-focused sign in, updates to iOS, macOS, and iPad and more Safari Technology Preview release 83 now available for macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra

Andy Grove, a software engineer introduced Ballista, a distributed compute platform and in his recent blog post, he explained his journey on this project. Roughly around eighteen months ago, he started the DataFusion project, an in-memory query engine that uses Apache Arrow as the memory model. The aim was to build a distributed compute platform in Rust that can compete with Apache Spark but which turned out to be difficult for him. Grove writes in a blog post, “Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be an overly ambitious goal at the time and I fell short of achieving that. However, some very good things came out of this effort. We now have a Rust implementation of Apache Arrow with a growing community of committers, and DataFusion was donated to the Apache Arrow project as an in-memory query execution engine and is now starting to see some early adoption.” He then took a break from working on Arrow and DataFusion for a couple of months and focused on some deliverables at work.  He then started a new PoC (Proof of Concept) project which was his second attempt at building a distributed platform with Rust. But this time he had the advantage of already having Arrow and DataFusion in his plate. His new project is called Ballista, a distributed compute platform that is based on Kubernetes and the Rust implementation of Apache Arrow.  A Ballista cluster currently comprises of a number of individual pods within a Kubernetes cluster and it can be created and destroyed via the Ballista CLI. Ballista applications can be deployed to Kubernetes with the help of Ballista CLI and they use Kubernetes service discovery for connecting to the cluster. Since there is no distributed query planner yet, Ballista applications must manually build the query plans that need to be executed on the cluster.  To make this project practically work and push it beyond the limit of just a PoC, Grove listed some of the things on the roadmap for v1.0.0: First is to implement a distributed query planner. Then bringing support for all DataFusion logical plans and expressions. User code has to be supported as part of distributed query execution. They plan to bring support for interactive SQL queries against a cluster with gRPC. Support for Arrow Flight protocol and Java bindings. This PoC project will help in driving the requirements for DataFusion and it has already led to three DataFusion PRs that are being merged into the Apache Arrow codebase. It seems there are mixed reviews for this initiative, a user commented on HackerNews, “Hang in there mate :) I really don't think you deserve a lot of the crap you've been given in this thread. Someone has to try something new.” Another user commented, “The fact people opposed to your idea/work means it is valuable enough for people to say something against and not ignore it.” To know more about this news, check out the official announcement.  Fastly CTO Tyler McMullen on Lucet and the future of WebAssembly and Rust [Interview] Rust 1.36.0 releases with a stabilized ‘Future’ trait, NLL for Rust 2015, and more Introducing Vector, a high-performance data router, written in Rust  

Last week, the Debian team released Debian 10.2 as the latest point release to the "Buster" series. This release includes a number of bug fixes and security updates. In addition, starting this release Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) is no longer supported on the ARMEL variant of Debian. Key updates in Debian 10.2 Security updates Some of the security fixes added in Debian 10.2 are: Apache2: These five vulnerabilities reported in the Apache HTTPD server are fixed:  CVE-2019-9517, CVE-2019-10081, CVE-2019-10082, CVE-2019-10092, CVE-2019-10097, CVE-2019-10098. Nghttp2: Two vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-9511 and CVE-2019-9513 found in the HTTP/2 code of the nghttp2 HTTP server are fixed. PHP 7.3: In PHP five security issues were fixed that could result in information disclosure or denial of service. These were CVE-2019-11036, CVE-2019-11039, CVE-2019-11040, CVE-2019-11041, CVE-2019-11042. Linux: In the Linux kernel five security issues were fixed that may have otherwise lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service, or information leaks. These were CVE-2019-14821, CVE-2019-14835, CVE-2019-15117, CVE-2019-15118, CVE-2019-15902. Thunderbird: The security issues reported in Thunderbird could have potentially resulted in the execution of arbitrary code, cross-site scripting, and information disclosure. These are tracked as CVE-2019-11739, CVE-2019-11740, CVE-2019-11742, CVE-2019-11743, CVE-2019-11744, CVE-2019-11746, CVE-2019-11752. Bug fixes Debian 10.2 brings several new bug fixes for some popular packages, some of which are: Emacs: The European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) key is now updated. Flatpak: Debian 10.2 includes the new upstream stable release of Flatpak, a tool for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux. GNOME Shell: In addition to including the new upstream stable release of GNOME Shell, this release fixes truncation of long messages in Shell-modal dialogs and avoids crash on the reallocation of dead actors LibreOffice: The PostgreSQL driver with PostgreSQL 12 is now fixed. Systemd: Starting from Debian 10.2, the reload failure does not get propagated to service results. The ‘sync_file_range’ failures in nspawn containers on ARM and PPC systems are fixed. uBlock: The uBlock adblocker is updated to its new upstream version and is compatible with Firefox ESR68. These were some of the updates in Debian 10.2. Check out the official announcement by the Debian team to know what else has shipped in this release. Severity issues raised for Python 2 Debian packages for not supporting Python 3 Debian 10 codenamed ‘buster’ released, along with Debian GNU/Hurd 2019 as a port Debian GNU/Linux port for RISC-V 64-bits: Why it matters and roadmap

After publicly sharing the release timeline for Electron 5.0 and beyond in February, On Tuesday Electron 5.0 was released, as per the plan, with new features, upgrades, and fixes. Electron ships with the latest version upgrades of core components Chromium, Node.js, and V8: Chromium 73.0.3683.119, Node.js 12.0.0, and V8 7.3.492.27. Electron 5.0 also includes improvements to Electron-specific APIs. With this release, Electron 2.0.x has reached end of life. Major changes in Electron 5.0 Packaged apps will now behave the same as the default app. A default application menu will be created (unless the app has one) and the window-all-closed event will be automatically handled. (unless the app handles the event) Mixed sandbox mode is now enabled by default. Renderers launched with sandbox: true will now be actually sandboxed, where previously they would only be sandboxed if mixed-sandbox mode was also enabled. The default values of nodeIntegration and webviewTag are now false to improve security. The SpellCheck API has been changed to provide asynchronous results. New features BrowserWindow now supports managing multiple BrowserViews within the same BrowserWindow. Electron 5 continues with Electron's Promisification initiative.  This initiative will convert callback-based functions in Electron to return Promises. During this transition period, both the callback and Promise-based versions of these functions will work correctly, and will both be documented. A total of 12 APIs were converted for Electron 5.0. Three functions were changed or added to systemPreferences to access macOS systems' colors. These include systemPreferences.getAccentColor, systemPreferences.getColor, and systemPreferences.getSystemColor The function process.getProcessMemoryInfo has been added to get memory usage statistics about the current process. New remote events have been added to improve security in the remote API. Now, remote.getBuiltin, remote.getCurrentWindow, remote.getCurrentWebContents and <webview>.getWebContents can be filtered. Deprecated APIs Three APIs are newly deprecated in Electron 5.0.0 and planned for removal in 6.0.0. These include Mksnapshot binaries for arm and arm64, ServiceWorker APIs on WebContents, and Automatic modules with sandboxed webContents. These are just a select few updates. For other specific details, you may see the release notes.  Also, check out the tentative 6.0.0 schedule for key dates in the Electron 6 development life cycle. Users can install Electron 5.0 with npm via npm install electron@latest or download the tarballs from Electron releases page. The Electron team publicly shares the release timeline for Electron 5.0 Flutter challenges Electron, soon to release a desktop client to accelerate mobile development How to create a desktop application with Electron [Tutorial]

Yesterday, GitHub announced in a blog post that they are deprecating the Network Graph from the repository’s Insights panel and that visits to this page will be redirected to the forks page instead. Following this announcement, they removed the network graph. On the same day, however, they deleted the blog post and also added back the network graph. The network graph is one of the useful features for developers on GitHub. It is used to display the branch history of the entire repository network, including branches of the root repository and branches of forks that contain commits unique to the network. Users of GitHub were alarmed on seeing the blog post about the removal of network graph without any prior notification or provision of a suitable replacement. For many users, this meant a significant burden of additional work. https://twitter.com/misaelcalman/status/1123603429090373632 https://twitter.com/theterg/status/1123594154255187973 https://twitter.com/morphosis7/status/1123654028867588096 https://twitter.com/jomarnz/status/1123615123090935808 Following the backlash and requests to bring back the Graph Network, on the same day, the Community Manager of GitHub posted on its community forum, that they will be reverting this change, based on the users’ feedback. Later on, the blog post announcing the deprecation was removed and the network graph was back on its website. This has brought a huge sigh of relief amongst GitHub’s users. The feature is famous for checking the state of a repository and the relationship between active branches. https://twitter.com/dotemacs/status/1123851067849097217 https://twitter.com/AlpineLakes/status/1123765300862836737 GitHub has not yet officially commented on why they removed the network graph in the first place. A Reddit user has put up an interesting shortlist of suspicions: The cost-benefit analysis from "The Top" determined that the compute time for generating the graph was too expensive, and so they "moved" the feature to a more premium account. "Moved" could also mean unceremoniously kill off the feature because some manager thought it wasn't shiny enough. Microsoft buying GitHub made (and will continue to make) GitHub worse, and this is just a harbinger of things to come. DockerHub database breach exposes 190K customer data including tokens for GitHub and Bitbucket repositories Apache Software Foundation finally joins the GitHub open source community Microsoft and GitHub employees come together to stand with the 996.ICU repository

The Qt team, in their blog, announced the official release of Qt with Python support. This is the first official of Qt framework with the support for Python and this release is tagged as Qt for Python 5.11. Previously  Python support for Qt developers was provided through the development of PySide module and now the work is said to have been done on PySide 2 to provide Qt for Python. However, Qt team has been working on the core Qt framework for quite some time to incorporate Python support and this is the first breakthrough in that direction. Adding to this, the Qt team has also informed that r version of Qt earlier than v5.11 will not support Python. In the release notes, the team has mentioned that the following versions of Qt will continue supporting this project and make the support for Python, stable going ahead. This is said to be the preview release, with a list of known issues for early adopters. The team is hoping to receive the feedback from the users so that it can make the binding more smooth and rectify the bugs. A lot of work has also gone into keeping the Qt syntax unchanged for flexible migration from C++, the de facto language for developing UI with Qt, to Python and the other way round. It mentions in the release blog, that the major roadblock in providing the Python binding for the C++ based Qt was the size of packages. This made the team to work on using external tools for Qt scripting with Python, which had resulted in the development of PySide in 2009. To extend the support for Python, the work has been done on C++ headers in Qt framework, so that the developers can write modules in Python. These efforts resulted in the latest PySide 2 which has very less overhead for using Python and Qt for GUI development. The Qt team has worked on developing the documentation for this and has provided examples enables you to understand the binding. Along with the Python binding for the core Qt framework, the team has also extended support for various Qt toolkits like Qtwidgets and QML to build interactive GUI with Qt and Python. For the early adopters of Qt for Python, to report a bug you use the Qt for Python project on bugreports.qt.io. The team can be reached on Freenode with #qt-pyside. Read more Qt 5.11 has arrived! WebAssembly comes to Qt. Now you can deploy your next Qt app in browser

This month, the OpenWrt Community announced the release of OpenWrt 18.06.4, the fourth service release of the stable OpenWrt 18.06 series. This release comes with a number of bug fixes in the network and system and brings updates to the kernel and base packages. The official page reads, “Note that the OpenWrt 18.06.3 release was skipped in favor to 18.06.4 due to a last-minute 4.14 kernel update fixing TCP connectivity problems which were introduced with the first iteration of the Linux SACK (Selective Acknowledgement)vulnerability patches.” What is the OpenWrt project? The OpenWrt Project, a Linux operating system, targets embedded devices and is a replacement for the vendor-supplied firmware consisting of a wide range of wireless routers and non-network devices.  OpenWrt ​is an easily modifiable operating system for routers and is powered by a Linux kernel. It offers a fully writable filesystem with optional package management instead of creating a single, static firmware. It is useful for developers as OpenWrt provides a framework for building an application without having to create a complete firmware image and distribution around it. It also gives freedom of full customization to the users that allows them to use an embedded device in many ways. What’s new in OpenWrt 18.06.4? In this release, Linux kernel has been updated to versions 4.9.184/4.14.131 from 4.9.152/4.14.95 in v18.06.2. It also comes with SACK (Selective Acknowledgement) security fixes for the Linux kernel and WPA3 security fixes in hostapd. It further offers security fixes for Curl and the Linux kernel, and comes with MT76 wireless driver updates. In this release, there are many network and system service fixes. Many users seem to be happy about this news and they choose routers based on the fact if they are supported by OpenWrt or not. A user commented on HackerNews, “I choose my routers based on if they are supported or not by OpenWrt. And for everybody that asks my opinion, too. Because they might not need/want/know/have a desire to install OpenWrt now, but it's good to have the door open for the future.” Users are also happy with OpenWrt’s interface, a user commented, “For people asking about the user interface of OpenWrt. I think it is very well dun. I get a long with it just fine and I am blind and have to use a screen reader. A11y in Luci is grate. All the pages make sence to most people you do not have to be a networking expert.” To know more about this news, check out OpenWrt’s official page. OpenWrt 18.06.2 released with major bug fixes, updated Linux kernel and more! Mozilla re-launches Project Things as WebThings, an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices Linux use-after-free vulnerability found in Linux 2.6 through 4.20.11  

Luna, a data processing and visualization environment, provides a library of highly tailored, domain-specific components as well as a framework for building new components. Luna focuses on domains related to data processing, such as IoT, bioinformatics, data science, graphic design and architecture. What’s so interesting about Luna? Data flow modeling Luna is a data flow modeling whiteboard that allows users to draw components and the way data flows between them. Components in Luna have simply nested data flow graphs and users can enter into any component or into its subcomponents to move from high to low levels of abstraction. It is also designed as a general purpose programming language with two equivalent representations, visual and textual. Data processing and visualizing Luna components can visualise their results and further use colors for indicating the type of data they exchange. Users can compare all the intermediate outcomes and also understand the flow of data by looking at the graph. Users can also work around the parameters and observe how they affect each step of the computation in real time. Debugging Luna can help in assisting and analyzing network service outages and data corruption. In case any errors occur, Luna tracks and display its path through the graph so that users can easily follow and understand where it comes from.  It also records and visualizes information about performance and memory consumption. Luna explorer, the search engine Luna comes with Explorer which is a context-aware fuzzy search engine that lets users query libraries for desired components as well as browse their documentation. Since the Explorer is context-aware, it can easily understand the flow of data and also predict users’ intentions and adjust the search results accordingly. Dual syntax representation Luna is also the world’s first programming language that features two equivalent syntax representations, that is visual and textual. Automatic parallelism Luna also features parallelism that uses the state of the art Haskell’s GHC runtime system which helps to run thousands of threads in a fraction of a second. It also automatically partitions a program and schedules its execution over available CPU cores. Users seem to be happy with Luna, a user commented on HackerNews, “Luna looks great. I've been doing work in this area myself and hope to launch my own visual programming environment next month or so.” Few others are happy because Luna features text syntax supports building functional blocks. Another user commented, “I like that Luna has a text syntax. I also like that Luna supports building graph functional blocks that can be nested inside other graphs. That's a missing link in other tools of this type that limits the scale of what you can do with them.” To know more about this, check out the official Luna website. Declarative UI programming faceoff: Apple’s SwiftUI vs Google’s Flutter Polyglot programming allows developers to choose the right language to solve tough engineering problems Researchers highlight impact of programming languages on code quality and reveal flaws in the original FSE study

Last week, the team behind TypeScript announced the availability of TypeScript 3.6 Beta. The full release of TypeScript 3.6 is scheduled for the end of the next month with a Release Candidate coming a few weeks prior.  What’s new in TypeScript 3.6? Stricter checking TypeScript 3.6 comes with stricter checking for iterators and generator functions. The earlier versions didn’t let users of generators differentiate whether a value was yielded or returned from a generator. With TypeScript 3.6, users can narrow down values from iterators while dealing with them. Simpler emit The emit for constructs like for/of loops and array spreads can be a bit heavy so TypeScript opts for a simpler emit by default that supports array types, and helps in iterating on other types using the --downlevelIteration flag. With this flag, the emitted code is more accurate, but is larger. Semicolon-aware code edits Older versions of TypeScript added semicolons to the end of every statement which was not appreciated by many users as it didn’t go along with their style guidelines. TypeScript 3.6 can easily detect if a file uses semicolons while applying edits and if a file lack semicolons, TypeScript doesn’t add one. DOM updates Following are a few of the declarations that have been removed or changed within lib.dom.d.ts: Instead of GlobalFetch, WindowOrWorkerGlobalScope is used. Non-standard properties on Navigator no more exist. webgl or webgl2 is used instead of experimental-webgl context. To know more about this news, check out the official post.  Next.js 9 releases with built in zero-config TypeScript support, automatic static optimization, API routes and more TypeScript 3.5 releases with ‘omit’ helper, improved speed, excess property checks and more Material-UI v4 releases with CSS specificity, Classes boilerplate, migration to Typescript and more      

Just two days ago, Amazon announced that it has made Amazon S3 Batch Operations, a storage management feature for processing millions of S3 objects in an easier way. It is also an automated feature that was first previewed at AWS re:Invent 2018. Users can now set tags or access control lists (ACLs), copy objects to another bucket, initiate a restore from Glacier, and also invoke an AWS Lambda function on each one. Developers and IT administrators can now change object properties and metadata and further execute storage management tasks with a single API request. For example, S3 Batch Operations allows customers to replace object tags, change access controls, add object retention dates, copy objects from one bucket to another, and even trigger Lambda functions against existing objects stored in S3. S3’s existing support for inventory reports are used to drive the batch operations. With this new feature of Batch Operations, users can now easily write code, set up any server fleets, or figure out how to partition the work and distribute it to the fleet. Users can now create a job in minutes with a couple of clicks. S3 uses massive, behind-the-scenes parallelism to manage the job. Users can also create, monitor, and manage their batch jobs using the S3 CLI, the S3 Console, or the S3 APIs. Important terminologies for batch operations Bucket An S3 bucket can hold a collection of any number of S3 objects, with optional per-object versioning. S3 Inventory report An S3 inventory report can be generated when daily or weekly bucket inventory is run. A report can be configured to include all of the objects in a bucket or to focus on a prefix-delimited subset. Manifest A manifest is an inventory report or a file in CSV format that identifies the objects to be processed in the batch job. Batch Action Batch action is the desired action on the objects which is described by a Manifest. IAM role An IAM role provides S3 with permission for reading the objects in the inventory report and perform the desired actions for writing the optional completion report. Batch job Batch references all of the above-mentioned terminologies. Each job has a status and a priority; higher priority (numerically) jobs take precedence over those with lower priority. Most of the users are happy because of this news as they think the performance of their projects might increase. A user commented on HackerNews, “This S3 request rate performance increase removes any previous guidance to randomize object prefixes to achieve faster performance. That means you can now use logical or sequential naming patterns in S3 object naming without any performance implications.” To know more about this news, check out Amazon’s blog post. Amazon finally agrees to let shareholders vote on selling facial recognition software Eero’s acquisition by Amazon creates a financial catastrophe for investors and employees Amazon Alexa is HIPAA-compliant: bigger leap in the health care sector      

After the first release candidate last month, Java 11 is now generally available. The GA version is the first release with long-term support (LTS). Some of the new features include nest-based access control, a new garbage collector, support for Unicode 11 and TLS 1.3. New features in Java 11 Some of the new features in Java 11 include nest-based access control, dynamic class-file constants, a no-op garbage collector called Epsilon and more. Let’s look at these features in detail. Nest-based access control ‘Nests’ are introduced as an access control context that aligns with the existing nested types in Java. Classes that are logically part of the same code but are compiled to distinct files can access private members with nests. It eliminates the need for compilers to insert bridge methods. Two members in a nest are described as ‘nestmates’. Nests do not apply to large scales of access control like modules. Dynamic class-file constants The existing Java class-file format is extended to support a new constant-pool form called CONSTANT_Dynamic. Loading this new form will delegate its creation to a bootstrap method in the same way linking an invokedynamic call site delegates linkage to a bootstrap method. The aim is to reduce the cost and disruption of creating new forms of materializable class-file constants giving broader options to language designers and compiler implementors. Epsilon, a no-op garbage collector Epsilon is a new experimental garbage collector in Java 11 that handles memory allocation but does not actually reclaim any memory. It works by implementing linear allocation in a single contiguous chunk memory. The JVM will shut down when the available Java heap is exhausted. Added support for Unicode 11 Java 11 brings Unicode 11 support to existing platform APIs. The following Java classes are mainly supported with Unicode 10: In the java.lang package: Character and String In the java.awt.font package: NumericShaper In the java.text package: Bidi, BreakIterator, and Normalizer This upgrade includes Unicode 9 changes and adds a total of 16,018 characters and ten new scripts. Flight recorder The flight recorder in Java 11 is a data collection framework for troubleshooting Java applications and the HotSpot JVM. It has a low overhead. TLS  1.3 TLS 1.3 was recently standardized and is the latest version of the Transport Layer Security protocol. TLS 1.3 is not directly compatible with the previous versions. The goal here is not to support every feature of TLS 1.3. Features deprecated Some of the features are also removed from Java 11. Applications depending on Java EE and COBRA modules need to explicitly call these modules. The Nashorn JavaScript Engine, Pack200 Tools and API have all been deprecated. For a complete list of features and deprecations, visit the JDK website. Oracle releases open source and commercial licenses for Java 11 and later JEP 325: Revamped switch statements that can also be expressions proposed for Java 12 No more free Java SE 8 updates for commercial use after January 2019

Yesterday, the Qt team came up with two major releases, Qt Creator 4.8.0 and the long term support of Qt 5.12. In October, the team released the beta version of Qt Creator 4.8.0 and Qt 5.12 LTS beta. Qt, a cross-platform SDK, helps in quickly and cost-effectively designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining software. What’s new in Qt Creator 4.8.0? Programming Language Support Qt Creator 4.8.0 comes with an added support to Language Server Protocol (LSP), a  standardized bridge between an editor/IDE and a programming language that supports various programming languages. Generic highlighter Qt Creator features code completion, highlighting the symbol under cursor, jumping to the symbol definition, and integrating diagnostics from the language server. This code highlighting is possible with the help of generic highlighter. C++ Support This version of Qt Creator has updated Clang code model to LLVM 7.0. The project information that the code model has, can be exported as a compilation database using the  new Build > Generate Compilation Database. New plugins Compilation Database Projects Qt Creator 4.8.0 comes with CompilationDatabaseProjectManager plugin, which helps users to work with compilation databases as projects. A compilation database is a list of files and the compiler flags are used for compiling them. Clang Format The ClangFormat plugin does the auto-indentation with the help of LibFormat, a library that implements automatic source code formatting based on Clang Format. Cppcheck The Cppcheck plugin integrates the diagnostics which are generated by the tool Cppcheck into the editor. LanguageClient This version comes with an experimental plugin, LanguageClient for supporting the language server protocol. Editing Qt Creator 4.8.0 comes with added support for the pastecode.xyz code pasting service. Also, now it is possible to change default editors in MIME type settings. Debugging With Qt Creator 4.8.0, it is possible to simultaneously run multiple debuggers. The debugger toolbar has an additional pop up menu where users can easily switch between running debugger instances and the preset view for starting new debuggers. The running debugger instances can also maintain its own set of views and their layout. Git This version comes with an added support for GitHub and GitLab. A navigation pane has been added to this version that shows branches. Also, an option for copy/move detection to git blame has been added. Android This release comes with an added support for command line arguments, environment variables, and API level 28. Improvements There is also an option for disabling automatic creation of run configurations in Qt Creator 4.8.0 An option that opens terminal with build or run environment has been added in the in this release. In Qt Creator 4.8.0, the process of handling the relative file paths for custom error parsers has been improved. It is now possible to add libraries for other target platforms in Add Library wizard. There are improvements made to the Qbs projects as it has added qmlDesignerImportPaths property for specifying QML import paths for Qt Quick Designer. The remote Linux has been updated to Botan 2.8 in this version. Major bug fixes Issues with local references for operator arguments has been fixed Qt Creator 4.8.0 now supports UI headers. The crash that occurs while removing diagnostics configuration has been fixed now. The issues regarding the detecting language version have been fixed now. It is now possible to process function extraction from nested classes. The startup issue with localized debugger output has been fixed. The previous version gave invalid access to network paths, this problem has now been fixed with Qt Creator 4.8.0. Get more information about Qt Creator 4.8.0 on Qt’s official blog post. Qt 5.12 LTS releases with support for Python, WebAssembly and more Qt for Python Qt 5.12 LTS supports Python by making all of the Qt APIs available to Python developers. The tech preview is currently available to the users for testing, while the official release will come up shortly after Qt 5.12 LTS. Qt for Python also supports Qt’s C++ APIs and makes them accessible to Python programmers. Python developers will now be able to create complex graphical applications and user interfaces. Qt for WebAssembly Qt 5.12 contains the technology preview for Qt for WebAssembly. Qt for WebAssembly compiles a Qt application to run in any modern Web browser. Qt Remote Objects Qt Remote Objects helps in making the IPC between Qt based processes seamless. It exposes the properties, signals, and slots of a QObject to other processes. Major improvements in Qt Creator 5.12 LTS Improvements to JavaScript engine The new release brings improvements to JavaScript engine, which now supports QML. This release now fully supports ECMAScript 7 which enables modern JavaScript and also simplifies the integration of Javascript libraries. Qt Creator 5.12 LTS supports ECMAScript modules and they can be loaded from C++ as well as QML/JS. TableView Qt Creator 5.12 LTS comes with TableView as another type of Item View in Qt Quick, a free software application framework developed and maintained by the Qt Project. Its performance is better than its previous QQC1 implementation. Pointer Handlers The Pointer Handlers of Qt 5.11 are now renamed as Input Handlers and are also fully supported as a feature in Qt Quick in Qt 5.12. The Input Handlers now simplify the creation of complex interactions. This release comes with two new Input Handlers for hovering and dragging items. Windows UI Automation This version comes with Windows UI Automation that allows Qt-based UWP applications to operate with accessibility and programmatic UI control tools. The tablet/touchscreen/touchpad/mouse input has been replaced with a unified implementation based Windows Pointer Input Messages on Windows 8 and above versions. To know more about Qt Creator 5.12 LTS, check out Qt’s official blog post. Qt creator 4.8 beta released, adds language server protocol Qt Creator 4.7.0 releases! How to Debug an application using Qt Creator