INSIDER'S GUIDE TO UDACITY ANDROID DEVELOPER NANODEGREE PART 4

INSIDER'S GUIDE TO UDACITY ANDROID DEVELOPER NANODEGREE PART 4 - BUILD IT BIGGER

Steadily advancing through the Android Developer Nanodegree, I've now reached Level 3 on the curriculum, "Gradle for Android and Java" in which students learn how to use Gradle to "turn a pile of source code and resources into a shipped,tested and functioning app".

Tools which automate a project's build process have become an essential part of any developer's toolchain, considering that nowadays the making of an application is not just constrained to writing code.There's also other accompanying tasks that should be run in parallel.Some of those are identifying and bundling dependencies, copying resources such as images and strings, running unit tests, diversifying through product flavors, minifying or obfuscating the source, handling signing keys, packing a jar or apk and deploying the finished product to a repository or even publishing it to Google Playstore.

Trying to follow a sequence and manual tracking of all those tasks as well as repeating them when deemed necessary, translates into decreased productivity forasmuch as the time lost on such tedious procedures, that could otherwise be automated, could have been funnelled to other activities such as coding, developing and improving the overall quality of the end product instead.

Fortunately there's dedicated build tools for that, Ant, Maven (for a rundown on building projects with Maven make sure to check my recent Hardcore DevOps article) and Gradle, the latter being considered the more advanced post-modern counterpart which offers a wider array of functionality, spans scope boundaries in being capable of working with projects written in multiple languages the likes of Java, C++ or Python, and brings significant performance improvements. (Gradle vs Maven: Performance Comparison).It's no coincidence that Google has chosen it as its official build system.

But what do all these have to do with Android Studio? Well Android Studio delegates everything about building an application to Gradle, although the same procedures could be very well performed on just the command line as well.

full article on i-programmer.info

Open Source Is Not Just About Software

It's about infrastructure as well, something that although not attracting the limelight, is as important as the open source software it hosts. Today the stewards of the largest open source registries in the world have issued an open letter demanding urgent reform in how open source infrastructure is funded, maintained, and operated. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/136-open-source/18334-open-source-is-not-just-about-software.html

Europe Gets Its Own LLM

EuroLLM is a fully open-sourced large language model made in Europe and built to support all twenty-four official EU languages. While several European states have separately produced their own LLMs, such as Greece's "Meltemi" or the recent offering from Switzerland "Apertus", there was no solution that catered for the languages of all 24 states belonging to the EU block. The time has come for this status to change with the appearance of EuroLLM, a foundational model that supports them all. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/18448-europe-gets-its-own-llm.html

The PaSh Project gives your POSIX script superpowers by utilizing parallelization in order to speed up execution times.

The PaSh Project gives your POSIX script superpowers by utilizing parallelization in order to speed up execution times. This leads to faster results for data scientists, engineers, biologists, economists, administrators, and programmers. I remember the time when the saying was "Learn Perl so you don't have to learn the Shell and its hundreds of utilities". Fast forward some decades and the use of shell scripts still has not been eradicated. On the contrary, their use has increased due to the rise of containers, VM's, administering the cloud, and Linux itself. This also serves as a lesson to those who are quick to denounce technologies as 'dead'. There's a time where a new use case revitalizes an old technology. So what is meant by "Unix philosophy"? full article on i-programmer: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/90-tools/14990-the-pash-project-advancing-the-unix-philosophy-one-step-further.html

PERL,INGRES,PROGRAMMING

Search This Blog