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Showing posts from 2020

Fly Over the Moon With Microsoft And Python

  Although targeted at kids, this extension to Microsoft's learning paths teaching Python programming inspired by NASA scientists, is recommended for anyone who wants a novel way into coding and machine learning.  Last summer Microsoft Learn and NASA partnered up to teach Python programming applied to Space exploration. Now they've added three new modules this time inspired by the Netflix's animation film "Over the Moon". full article on i-programmer

Microsoft Offers Web Development for Beginners

  Microsoft has released a new self-paced and free curriculum for total beginners to both programming and web development. Web-Dev-For-Beginners , which is hosted on GitHub with links to You Tube videos, is  a collaboration among many developers across the Microsoft stack; Project managers, Cloud, AI and JavaScript advocates, each one working on different bits of the curriculum which comprises of a total of 24 lessons. It teaches HTML,CSS and JavaScript, the latter without the use of any frameworks. This is done to avoid introducing yet another complexity to the project, that of having to learn the intricacies of a separate framework, while keeping the focus on learning the language itself. It's a good approach that follows the newest trends which encourages people to break out of frameworks and going for plain vanilla Javascript. full article on i-programmer

.NET On QA-[Has the time come for a new StackOverflow?]

  Microsoft Q&A is a global, community-driven platform for timely, high-quality technical answers. Is StackOverflow in trouble? Not quite because this is an effort just focused on Microsoft products.The newest addition to the platform is the section on .NET and its sibling technologies such as ASP.NET, C#, F#, Xamarin, Windows Forms and so on. Specifically it is divided into three distinct categories - Runtime; App & Web Development; and Languages, Data and more. The Runtime category involves .NET 5, .NET Core and the .NET Framework. App & Web Development and Languages is split into Cross-platform, Desktop and Mobile Development, ASP.NET Core and ASP.NET (Classic), while Languages, Data and more comprises of Languages, Machine Learning & AI, Data, Acquisition and Deployment, Tools and More. full article on i-programmer

Get Super-Productive With JetBrains Space

  Fancy a super tool that combines what you can find in Slack, Github, JIRA and Google Docs into one package? Then read on. JetBrains has launched its new productivity tool called  Space , an integrated team environment and all-in-one collaboration solution that covers software development, project/team management, and communications. As such it's a direct competitor to Slack and Microsoft Teams amongst others. full article on i-programmer

Yann LeCun’s Deep Learning Course Free From NYU

A Deep Learning course taught by Yann LeCun, a pioneer of convolutional neual networks and Facebook's Chief AI scientist, has been made available online for free. This is courtesy of the New York University's Center for Data Science or NYU CDS for short, where Yann LeCun taught the course last Spring under the code name DS-GA 1008.It is based on Python/Pytorch wich code can be run online on Jupyter Notebooks. A quick look at the curiculum shows that the course is cutting edge and covers most deep learning techniques;supervised/self-supervised learning, embedding methods, metric learning, convolutional and recurrent nets and all that with practical application on computer vision, natural language understanding and speech recognition. full article on i-programmer.info

Hour of Code Teaches AI For Good

  It's the time of year when the world-class Hour of Code once more commences; just an hour to  introduce coding to the uninitiated. This is not just an article about Code.org alone, but a wider look at its emphasis on AI for a new generation. Integrated into the larger worldwide annual Computer Science Education week, this year it takes place from December 7 to 11.Hour of Code's novel mission has always been to get everybody coding, aged from 4 to 104, by providing: A one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code, showing that anybody can learn the basics, and broadening participation in the field of computer science. It tries to spread this kind of excitement to the widest audience possible by empowering anyone who wants to, to register and set up such an event as well as to publicize it on the Hour of Code website in order to make it available to anyone regardless race, sex, age or state.The next step is to go through one of the many Hour of Code tuto

Jetpack Compose for Desktop Milestone 2

Following its initial announcement of Jetpack Compose for Desktop last month, JetBrains has now announced Milestone 2, updated with a Swing interoperability layer. full article on i-programmer.info

The State Of Secure Software Development - Three OpenSSF Courses

The Open Source Security Foundation has recently launched three brand new and free courses on Secure Software Development, which are hosted on edX. Nowadays every company is a software house regardless of the business it is in be it finance, manufacturing or healthcare. To provide value, businesses have to communicate through software applications built in-house or by a third party. The problem is that cyberattackers will attack those applications, probing them to uncover vulnerabilities to exploit and get access to your internal networks, steal company and customer data or just create havoc. full article on i-programmer

Nvidia's AI Supercomputer For Medical Research And Drug Discovery

  Last month Nvidia unveiled plans to build a supercomputer intended for AI research in health care. This prompts us to look at AI's potential role in health care and how it is already being used. Two things have been made clear due to the pandemic. Firstly, that a strong, national, and free-for-all public health system is imperative, and secondly that spending on advancing research on medical and health care applications should be a prime priority for both nation states and the private sector alike. For the latter, the focus is turning to AI. For instance, if the AI  in place had been more advanced, then maybe a Covid vaccine would have required much less to invent, as such saving thousand of lives. full article on i-programmer.info

Learn To Develop On Android With MAD Skills

  Modern Android Development (MAD) Skills is a free series of videos and articles by Google that teaches the modern ways of doing development on the Android platform. When Google talks about modern Android development it means: 1.Android Studio 2.Kotlin 3.Jetpack 4.App Bundles. full article on i-programmer.info

Introducing Jetpack Compose for Desktop

  JetBrain's Jetpack Compose for Desktop is an open source project being developed in collaboration with Google’s Jetpack Compose, intended to simplify and accelerates UI development for desktop applications, and allow extensive UI code sharing between Android and desktop applications. It's first milestone release is now available.  Is a 100% shared codebase between different platforms a futile dream? Many have tried to cross boundaries with a framework that can bridge multiple platforms, that is write your code once and let it run seamlessly on macOS, Linux, Windows, and iOS. But, if even Microsoft can't unify the UI framework of its Windows platform, what can you expect from attempting to go across platforms? full article on i-programmer.info

Foojay - All about Java and the OpenJDK

  Tracking the OpenJDK is not an easy feat. It evolves rapidly under a release cycle of a new version every 6 months, hence there's hoards of new features, changes and bug fixes.This is where foojay steps in,  collecting all the relevant information. What was the alternative? A lot of manual searching. scouring disparate sources such as the OpenJDK mailing lists and official blog posts. So what does foojay do differently? It organizes information into distinct sections: full article on i-programmer

Introducing The Android Kotlin Developer Nanodegree

  The old Android Java Developer Nanodegree is shelved, making way for the new kid on the block - Kotlin By now everybody has been aligned to the fact that Android development is dominated by Kotlin.What's surprising is the rapid adoption rate.In just a couple of years it has totally wiped out the ways of Java development on the platform, and that without any formal education offerings. Udacity to address that need for formality and certification now releases the  Android Kotlin Developer Nanodegree . full article on i-programmer

Introducing the DigitalOcean App Platform

  With DigitalOcean's new App Platform, setting up and deploying an app to the cloud as easy as point and click. Built on Kubernetes, DigitalOcean's new offering the App Platform, shifts the focus from handling the Infrastructure to just handling your application's development. It does that by taking care of all the backend setup like servers and databases, operating systems and application runtimes, allowing developers to deploy their code on the cloud by hooking up a GitHub repository hosting the code. full article on i-programmer

Learn JavaScript and Node.js With Microsoft

  Microsoft loves Open Source and loves Python. Now it seems, it loves JavaScript too? Who would have thought that someday Microsoft would promote and teach languages and frameworks not based on .NET? Ten or more years ago Microsoft's interest in dynamic languages materialized under the Dynamic Language Runtime project, a project that aimed to port such languages to the CLR to allow them to  inter-operate with the .NET languages under the same roof. I shared my thoughts about in a review of  Pro DLR in .NET 4.0 book . full article on i-programmer

Why were the DLR based languages such as IronPython and IronRuby gone defunct?

Why were the DLR based languages such as IronPython and IronRuby gone defunct? Were they victims of their success in that they were competent competitors to the .NET languages like C#? Scott Hunter's response: There were points in time where with .NET we just tried to do too many things at the same time. The DLR languages were more victims of us just trying to focus the basics of .NET again. During that time frame we were building new web frameworks based on competition and starting our open source journey. Back then we gave customers so many options that it made the platform appear more complicated. on medium

The CNIL publishes the GDPR guide for developers

The GDPR is a headache for developers. It's just not clear enough what we have to do to keep our apps compliant. Fortunately CNIL has published a detailed guide for just this case. French institute "Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés"  abbreviated to CNIL, is an independent administrative authority that exercises its functions in accordance with the 1978 French Data Protection Act, amended in August 2004. full article on i-programmer.info

Analytic SQL for Developers

  Introducing a free, self-paced, quick and official course, one of of Oracle's Dev Gym quizzes, about the concepts and syntax behind SQL's Analytic functions. Oracle's Dev Gym quizzes, a collection of workouts and classes, offer a form of "active learning" recognizing the idea that to get better at writing code, you actually need to write code - and also read and understand code.So these quizzes are a mix of video and code tutorials that incorporate an interactive playground where you can tweak and run the tutorial's attached code in order to strengthen your code comprehension skills and learn in depth the subject at hand.To join you just need an Oracle account, which is free too. full article on i-programmer.info

The Insider's Guide to the Java Web Developer Nanodegree - 4

  Another installment of our ongoing in-depth coverage of the new Udacity Nanodegree program that will enhance your career prospects as a Java web developer. At last we get to play in the big league with the Java Persistence API and Hibernate. Because there's always a confusion around JPA vs Hibernate, the first thing we learn in  Data Stores and Persistence  is that the Java Persistence API (JPA) is the specification and that Hibernate is an implementer of it; just like in OOP where a concrete class implements an interface. full article on i-programmer.info

Introduction to OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect

  Getting familiar with OpenID and OAuth is really difficult.There are dozens of specifications to go through, and to make things even worse the two protocols involve different terminology. To help out, Pragmatic Web Security offers a free and outstanding course on OAuth and OIDC 101. full article on i-programmer

Android Jetpack Compose Is Welcome, But What About The Churn?

  The ever-changing landscape of development on the Android platform gets an update with the new Jetpack Compose UI toolkit. I think it's important to know where to draw the line between evolution and stability. On one hand innovation and bringing new ideas and features to a framework are necessary and welcome. On the other hand if you constantly and totally substitute the ways you do things rather than improve them, you force everyone to work just in order to just keep up. The Android platform is one such case - breaking backwards compatibility every step of the way. First there was Java, now there's Kotlin. Saying that, it's not just the introduction of Kotlin that has changed the face of development, but the whole revamping of the platform, the libraries and the way of building apps. on i-programmer

The Insider's Guide to the Java Web Developer Nanodegree - 3

  In our ongoing in-depth coverage of the upskilling program that will enhance your career prospects as a Java web developer, we move onto the third lecture in the series, "Web Services and APIs" . But before doing that, a few words about last chapter's final project "SuperDuperDrive", a personal storage app that allows users to store files, personal notes, and website credentials for a new company in the cloud storage business. As with every Nanodegree project, this one was challenging and offered a great opportunity to sharpen the skills gained. From the students' part it required a lot of research, that is a lot of googling around and reading the official documentation. I've even used things not covered in the class like RequestParams, Redirection, RedirectView, RedirectAttributes and Forwarding, which I nicely blended with my Controllers. full article on i-programmer

Showcase Your Code With Grasshopper's Gallery

  Google's intuitive learn-to code-platform, Grasshopper has added a Gallery feature, the idea of which is to promote sharing of  projects and to showcase your code.   Grasshopper, named to honor Grace Hopper, is already a familiar friend of the I Programmer team. Back in 2018, we witnessed its early beginnings when it went public having been an internal tool at Google, see  Grasshopper - An Area 120 App To Teach Coding " The initial release was for Android and IOs and, of course, coding on a mobile device is not the most intuitive thing to do. Thus in 2019 a version for the desktop was released, which we described in  Grasshopper Now On the Desktop  - although rather than installing software , "desktop" means that it runs inside the browser. full article on i-programmer

The Insider's Guide to the Java Web Developer Nanodegree - part2

  I Programmer team member Nikos Vaggalis enrolled in the inaugural sessions of Udacity's new Java Web Developer Nanodegree program and is charting his progress through this adventure of coding and learning. This second installment is on   Spring Boot Basics. . Having already gained one Udacity Nanodegree, an experience I documented in my 7-part  Insider's Guide To Udacity Android Developer Nanodegree , I signed up to the new  Java Web Developer Nanodegree  with a fairly good idea of what to expect. The idea of this series is to share what it's really like and in this installment I look at the course content for Chapter 2, Spring Boot Basics, which students tackle straight after the introductory material in the first month of this four-month program. I’m going into quite a lot of detail so that you can appreciate the depth that this program achieves. full article on i-programmer

js1024 - How Much Awesomeness Can You Pack In Just 1K?

js1024 is the continuation of the legendary js1k JavaScript golfing competition which ended last year and like its predecessor is planned to be an annual contest. The winners of the first one  have just been announced.  js1024 is a competition falling in the realm of the Demoscene where you create little games or audio-visual demonstrations using as few resources as possible. One notable example is js13kGames, which we  covered  back in 2017, where you have to write a full game within a 13K limit. In js1024 the requirements are even more restricted - your code's size should come up to a maximum of 1024 bytes! Really, what can you do with that amount of space? full article on i-programmer

The Insider's Guide to the Java Web Developer Nanodegree

Learn to program the Web with Java and Spring in Udacity's newest four month Nanodegree program. Nikos Vaggalis has accepted the challenge and is preparing to embark on an adventure of coding and learning. If you want to join him enrollment is now open for a starting date of July 28th. Nowadays it's difficult to to tell programming languages apart. More or less everybody does everything, others do it easier, others more difficult but you'll get to the end result one way or another. For instance, every language does functional programming, reactive programming, text munging with regular expressions or programming the server backend; you name it; you see where this is going. So what's the melting point? Frameworks. Frameworks are the Trojan horses to the language. Choosing a framework gets you a deal with a particular language too. For example, a lot of commotion going on for years was about why to learn Perl, generally considered by many a dead language (which of course

Now Perl 6 Is Raku, Perl 5 Can Be 7

After Perl 6's renaming to Raku, acknowledging that it really is another language, Perl can now use number 7 without fear. It already has claimed the newly freed territory with the announcement that Perl 5.32 with more modern and sensible defaults is to be Perl 7. That is, pragmas and features already being advised for years to programmers writing in Perl, like turning strict and warnings on, use 5.010 or importing Modern::Perl, are now going to be set by default when you start writing a new program in Perl 7. full article on i-programmer

JetBrains Plugin Adds DeepCode Integration

DeepCode, a SAST tool bug finder based on machine learning, can now be used seamlessly from within IntelliJ, PyCharm, and WebStorm. There's a lot of interest lately on Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Tools, and that has to do with the fact that the software written today is very complex and very large - a simple code review by humans won't cut it anymore. Thus the introduction of SAST tools into the CI/CD pipeline and more specifically at the Commit-time and Test-time check phases.We've recently covered a new hybrid kind of tool of the genre, in " Semgrep - More Than Just a Glorified Grep" , which occupies a space somewhere in between grep and a SAST tool - more expressive than grep, but not as hard to tweak and learn as a SAST. on i-programmer

Monetize Open Source Software with XS:CODE

Introducing XS:CODE, a subscription based service looking to get OSS developers paid for their work. Even as a hobby, writing OSS is serious work, up to par or even superseding that of closed source software, since hundreds or even thousand of eyes will be looking at your source and judging you. Hence you should be on your top performance. On top of that, you have treat it as a real world project which has to be launched, managed, maintained and contributed to. Some of the tasks involved in that, as we've explored in  "The Open Source Guides To Managing Open Source Software Projects" , are to: full article on i-programmer

Updated AI Fairness 360 Toolkit Supports R and Scikit-learn

AI Fairness 360 is IBM's evolving toolkit which tackles the big problem of discrimination and bias diffusing the machine learning models. It now gets compatibility with Scikit-learn and R. Here at IProgrammer we have examined AI-based bias and discrimination many times in the past both from a technical and societal perspective. Societal wise in " Ethics Guidelines For Trustworthy AI"  we've gone through the European Commission's attempt to release a set of guidelines on how to build AIs that can be trusted by society. The verdict was that in order to have "Trustworthy AI", the following three components were deemed necessary:  on i-programmer

Mojolicious Web Clients - book review

Mojolicious might be famous for its server side presence but that doesn't rule out excellence on the client side as well, as  this book demonstrates. This book about writing post modern client application that can interact with web sites build with Mojolicious or otherwise. As on the server side, so on the client side there's a sheer amount of choices and depth of functionality that Mojo supports. JSON and XML parsing, DOM handling with CSS selectors and asynchronous requests amongst others. One namespace to rule them all. on i-programmer.info

Semgrep - More Than Just a Glorified Grep

Introducing a tool to search through code for flaws where plain regexes fall flat and using Static Application Security Testing would be overkill. Semgrep proclaims itself as: "a tool for easily detecting and preventing bugs and anti-patterns in your codebase. It combines the convenience of grep with the correctness of syntactical and semantic search". It isn't just a glorified grep, though. It occupies a space somewhere in between grep and a SAST tool - more expressive than grep, but not as hard to tweak and learn as a SAST. on i-programmer

Java Language Extensions for SQL Server Open Sourced

SQL Server had for a long time been integrated with the Common Language Runtime under which it could interface with the general programming languages of the .NET framework, allowing for writing stored procedures, triggers, user-defined types, user-defined functions, user-defined aggregates, and streaming table-valued functions using the likes of Visual Basic .NET or C#. But that's deep integration. For the rest of the languages, not part of the .NET framework, SQL Server can still interact with them at a minimal level through the so-called Language Extensions SDK, for the time being just programs written in Java. on i-programmer

Machine Learning Python Plugins For GIMP

The open-source raster graphics editor, GIMP, gets a big creative boost with brand new Machine Learning extensions dubbed GIMP-ML. While the aim of GIMP-ML is primarily to make some tough image processing tasks much easier using Deep Learning, the project can also claim to provide to be a victory of open source  over its closed source counterparts, even over high caliber commercial applications such as Photoshop. It benefits from the advantage of open architectures, open source and community driven effort in the extensibility of applications. With those ML extensions GIMP mixes Science and Art to bring forth some pretty magical effects - background blurring, face parsing, generative portrait modification, relighting, motion blurring and generating super-resolution images. on i-programmer

The Android PrivacyBreacher Project

An open source research tool and application that looks into the circumstances in which Android's permission model can be compromised to harm user privacy. Note that we are not talking of exploits here, but normal usage of Android's APIs which can be manipulated in ways that can expose the phone user's privacy. For example. one issue is that apps can monitor the phone's screen state, which of course has legitimate uses. but can also be manipulated into: on i-programmer

Free Database Schemas From DrawSQL

DrawSQL, a SaaS platform for visualizing databases schemas, has made 200+ database diagram templates available for free. The high quality collection comprises schemas by real world applications and open source packages like Django, Laravel or Wordpress. We all know that great application infrastructure stands on the shoulders of a great Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). And we also know that designing a good ERD is a fragile and tough process, hence many developers look for inspiration. or even basing theirs upon predefined examples of solid examples found in real world applications and scenarios. full article on i-programmer

Learn To Code with JetBrains Academy

With tracks on Java, Kotlin and Python and with many hands-on projects, the new JetBrains Academy  is currently free under an Early Access Program. This is an opportunity not to be missed The free EAP offer acts as a promotion of JetBrains deal with the new Hyperskill platform which takes care of the underlying infrastructure, under JetBrain's attempt to capture a share of the growing developer education market. The aim of the platform is to prepare students in their language of choice for junior dev positions. While all you need to get started is a browser, since the code can be run within it, some parts of the service are accessible only via JetBrains IDEs under an educational license; in essence free too. on i-programmer

The 16-Hour Guide to the AWS Developer Associate Exam

FreecodeCamp has released this great-sounding class on developing for the AWS platform, which is of interest regardless of whether or not you're looking to get the AWS Associate certificate. We take a detailed look. As more and more businesses move onto the cloud to take advantage of PaaS/IaaS and reduce their operating costs, their developers will find themselves one way or the other, soon or later, bound to work on a Cloud platform. And AWS is the most likely since it's the most popular. on i-programmer

Play & Learn With CryptoHack

CryptoHack is a fun way to learn cryptography and also acquire valuable CTF skills. Through a series of puzzles, it challenges you to break bad implementations of "modern" crypto, such as AES, RSA, and Elliptic-curves. Although CryptoHack took its inspiration from Capture the Flag competitions, it focuses exclusively on their cryptography aspects, that is breaking ciphers, decrypting, encoding and converting between formats. Its challenges include:  Downloading vulnerable source code and determining how to crack the output. Making web requests to a server and slowly extracting confidential data. Connecting to a port and performing a man-in-the-middle attack on two parties trying to communicate.  full article on i-programmer.info

Dwitter On The JavaScript Demoscene

How much awesomeness can you fit in only 140 characters of JavaScript and a (HTML) canvas? Part of the demoscene, Dwitter hosts small but powerful user-contributed JavaScript snippets that run in the browser and do amazing things. First, what is a demoscene?  full article on i-programmer.info

Minecraft Education Edition Worlds Available For Free

Written by Nikos Vaggalis     Friday, 10 April 2020 In yet another offering during the pandemic, Microsoft has made a number of Minecraft Worlds available for free until June 30. Now that schools are closed, you have to keep the kids occupied somehow. What better way to learn and educate through Minecraft?  Back in 2019 we covered Minecraft's  Computer Science Curriculum  targeted at students in the age range 11 to 16. This has has around 30 hours of material for teaching students the merits of writing code to automate tasks using the core concepts of computational thinking, including Artificial Intelligence. full article on i-programmer.info

Access ACM Digital Library for Free

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic,ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Library has opened its gates to the public for free until June 30, 2020. It's a unique opportunity to delve into the depths of the ACM library,well maze more appropriately, since the material that it contains is very rich and spans multiple Computing disciplines. There's the main categories of Journals, Magazines, Proceedings, Books, SIGs (Special Interest Groups), Conferences and People to explore. Under Journals you'll find: full article on i-programmer.info

Conferences Going Virtual

Due to the Covid-19 planetary wide scare, many conferences instead of being canceled have gone purely virtual. To know which ones are choosing this delivery method Spokable has posted an ever-updated tracker of virtual conferences, at the moment covering over 40 online events. Having cancelled Strata California and Strata London events, O'Reilly  went virtual with Strata Data & AI Superstream. full article on i-programmer.info

Getting Started With React For Free

Stuck at home with only the Internet for company? Learn the basics of React.js with this free class by Skillshare engineer, Daniel Nastase. No knowledge of React is needed, but basic knowledge of Javascript, HTML and CSS is required. The class comprises of 13-byte sized and hand-on videos and is split into two parts. The first part, videos 1-10 cover the fundamentals of React such as the components, state, css, rendering etc. All the lessons are compact and focus on a single topic. It's good and consistent organizing that does not wear the viewer out. In the second part, videos 11-13, you combine everything you've learned to build an example application. full article on i-programmer

GitTrends: GitHub Insights

GitTrends is an open source smartphone app to monitor the popularity of your GitHub repos that is really useful when you have a lot of repos to keep track of. Built with Xamarin the app runs on both iOS and Android devices and lets you monitor: on i-programmer

Tensorflow 2.0 In 7 Hours

Learn all about Tensorflow with this new 7-hour, information-packed and free course that not only shows how to apply Tensorflow 2.0 in your programs, also teaches the concepts of Machine Learning, AI and their core algorithms. All that in a simple and hands-on way. While it makes the concepts of ML and AI approachable,this video-based course is not addressed to total beginners at coding as it presumes at least basic knowledge in Python. full article on i-programmer

GitHub Mobile App Available

Written by Nikos Vaggalis     Thursday, 19 March 2020 After four months in beta, GitHub for Mobile is finally generally available, with fully-native experience on both iOS and Android. We put it through its paces to show what you can do with it. GitHub for Mobile was the major new product promising to bring collaboration tools to the small screen announced by Nat Friedman during his keynote at last year's GitHub Universe. The idea of the app is to give you the flexibility to move work forward and stay in touch with your team, wherever you are, with the ability to review code and merge changes from anywhere. While its arrival is exciting news, you have to understand the use case of the app. According to the official announcement: full article on i-programmer

TypeOfNaN JavaScript Quizzes

Learn JavaScript fundamentals through fun and challenging quizzes! This interactive quiz provides a total hands-on learning experience. It currently has 72 questions on a variety of Javascript concepts and more are being added. full article on i-programmer

LInQer ports .NET LINQ to Javascript

LinQer is a library that sprang out of the need to fix two problems of Javascript's built-in iteration methods. It brings .NET's LINQ approach to databases to JavaScript. The problems with the iteration methods that needed fixing were mainly that: they are applicable to arrays only and that  they are eager,meaning that the set undergoing intermittent transformations is the full one,even when only a few items are needed from it: "Every time you filter or you map something you create a new array". full article on i-programmer

Where's Java Going In 2020

In this third and last part of the saga examining Java's ecosystem in which we try to decipher its direction, we look at  Build tools, the popularity of other languages on the JVM and conclude with career tips for all aspiring Java rock-star developers! The findings come from three surveys: Snyk's "JVM Ecosystem Report 2020" with over 2000 respondents, Baeldung's The State of Java in 2019 with over 6,700 both of which we've considered previously, and the JRebel 2020 Java Technology Report which is the latest to provide us with data, from 400 respondents. With regard to developers choice of build tools, the JRebel survey found a   fairly even split between Maven (44%) and Gradle (47%):  full article on i-programmer

CheerpJ Revitalizes Legacy Java Applications

CheerpJ is a Java-to-Javascript runtime and compiler that can convert any Java application to HTML5 for in-browser rendering. CheerpJ 2.0, which features WebAssembly support, was released earlier this month. According to its developers, Leaning Technologies, a company which provides WebAssembly solutions, its use-case scenarios are threefold : The conversion of legacy Java applications and Java Applets to HTML5 with minimal or no effort, to extend their life until deprecation, or until a replacement native HTML application has been developed. The migration of an existing Java client to a browser-based web application, usually by converting the business logic from Java to WebAssembly/JavaScript with CheerpJ, and rewriting the UI in native HTML. Using (converted) Java libraries as part of a native web application. full article on i-programmer

Java Choices Explored

Continuing our broad foray into the Java ecosystem we look at the most popular choices in Java's runtime platforms, framework technologies, IDEs, PaaS providers, databases and, of course, JDKs, with the much debated Oracle JDK versus OpenJDK. full article on i-programmer.info

What Makes Developers Tick

CodinGame has explored this issue with a survey of its dev community. Among key insights, its new report reveals which country is the best to work in. CodinGame is a challenge-based training platform where programmers can improve their coding skills with fun exercises and is an easy-to-use platform for tech hiring companies. It claims a community of 1.7 million people worldwide and has over 500 international clients. For the third year running, CodinGame profiled its developer community about their education & qualifications, what they would like to learn more about in 2020, their most loved programming languages versus their most dreaded, their level of fulfillment in coding and much more. The data for the 2020 Report was collected via Survey Monkey from October to December 2019. Responses came from over 20,000 code enthusiasts in 120 countries. Here we consider some of the key takeaways from the survey.  The question  HOW DO DEVELOPERS LEARN TO CODE?  gets the ball rollin

Query Unicode From The Command Line

uni is an open source tool with just four commands that lets you query the Unicode database from the command line. It will make you wonder how you went through life dealing with character encodings without it.  With this tool you get to interrogate the Unicode database (full support for Unicode 12.1) from the CLI. For example,working with HTML and want to find the html escape of the € euro sign? Tell uni to identify it: full article on i-programmer

ActiveState Komodo IDE Now Free

There will no longer be a fee for Komodo, the multi-language IDE for Python, PHP, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, Node.js, Golang, Ruby, Perl, and a variety of other languages and frameworks.  Last time we reported on Komodo, back in 2017, see  Komodo 11 With Revamped Code Intelligence , its lightweight counterpart Komodo EDIT was the only free offering, and of course had limitations: Komodo Edit provides the basic functionality you need for programming without debugging, unit testing, collaboration, or integration with build systems unit testing Now, with the release of Komodo 12, you get all that for free, plus the embedded ActiveState Platform with which you can automatically build runtime environments by just choosing your packages letting the Platform to resolve the necessary dependencies, as well as the State Tool, with which you can instantly and locally deploy your runtime environment. full article on i-programmer