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Showing posts from June, 2020

ShiftLeft focuses on developer productivity with next generation static analysis solution

ShiftLeft has announced an updated version of its NextGen Static Analysis solution. The release features new workflows designed to help developers improve security and enhance productivity. According to the company, developer productivity suffers when security isn’t automated or integrated into the life cycle. A recent ShiftLeft survey found 96% of developers felt a disconnect between development and security workflows, which impacted productivity. Additionally, respondents revealed developer-friendly security workflows were a higher priority than protecting apps in production environments. RELATED CONTENT: Developers buying in to security tasks “The only way to deliver security at the pace of modern SDLCs is to create a culture of individual developer accountability for the security of the code they write. However, this demands new AppSec solutions purpose-built for today’s requirements,” said Manish Gupta, CEO of ShiftLeft. “Based on our new survey, it’s clear developers feel

SD Times news digest: Split’s new feature flag capabilities, IBM Trsuted AI toolkits, and WhiteSource adds support for Microsoft Visual Studio

Split announced new capabilities that allow enterprises to stream feature flags to their apps in milliseconds and to export data records on demand.  As part of the new Feature Flag Data Streaming capability, Split has also included a Data Hub  that gives enterprises a single place to view, query and export all of their feature flag and event data. “Our new Streaming Architecture addresses that issue by ensuring feature flag changes are made in a virtually instantaneous way, so applications and users are not affected,” said Trevor Stuart, the co-founder and head of product at Split. “It’s an important addition to our enterprise-grade delivery platform that prioritizes data privacy, ensures fault tolerance, and always keeps features in sync.” Additional details are available here . IBM donates Trusted AI toolkits to the Linux Foundation AI The LFAI voted to host and incubate these IBM Trusted AI projects: Adversarial Robustness 360, AI Fairness 260, and AI Explainability 360. “Don

TypeScript 4.0 beta is here

Microsoft has announced the first beta release for TypeScript 4.0. The most recent version of the language, TypeScript 3.9, was released last month .  TypeScript 3.9 had introduced speed and user experience improvements. TypeScript 4.0 follows Microsoft’s pattern of trying to introduce new features that don’t introduce breaking changes for older versions.  The next version doesn’t add many breaking changes, but adds new features such as variadic tuple types, labeled tuple elements, class property inference from constructors, short-circuiting assignment operators, custom JSX factories, and more.   The few breaking changes that are included in this release are “lib.d.ts” declaration changes, errors when properties try to override accessors, optional operands for “delete”, and deprecation of the node factory.  “This beta takes us on our first step into TypeScript 4.0, and while it brings a new major version, don’t fret – there are no substantially larger breaking changes than usual.

DevOps Report: Testing is Everything

DevOps teams often struggle to meet speed and quality goals simultaneously. Intelligent test automation company mabl just released its 2020 State of DevOps Report based on a survey of 1,000 software professionals, including testers and QA professionals (59%) as well as developers and engineers (34%). The key takeaway is that manual testing doesn’t cut it. “The teams doing manual testing are seeing no customer experience lift, even if they’re doing a lot of tests manually,” said Chou Yang, content and brand marketer at mabl. “The work it takes to implement a smart testing strategy and automation can be a time-consuming investment up front, and requires a skillset that’s hard to find, so they stick with manual testing to get by.” There’s a trade-off between what’s easiest in the short-term versus what’s wise over the long-term. As the report illustrates, the highest performing DevOps teams have integrated many types of automated testing into their automated CI/CD pipelines. Those team

SD Times news digest: Micro Focus’ Visual COBOL 6.0 and Enterprise Studio 6.0, Visual Studio Basic Essentials extension pack and IBM Blockchain Platform 2.5

Micro Focus announced the general availability of Visual COBOL 6.0 and Enterprise Suite 6.0. According to the company, the new releases provide versatile application, process, and infrastructure modernization tools for enterprise developers.  “Through new insight-driven tools, API development capabilities and robust deployment options, these Micro Focus solutions give developers new ways to work with complex COBOL and mainframe systems while delivering on a cloud strategy,” said Neil Fowler, the general Mmanager of Application Modernization and Connectivity at Micro Focus.  Enhancements to Enterprise Suite 6.0 include application changes to support SOA/API initiatives by identifying, exposing and integrating trusted functionality as new services, the ability to gain insight through process modernization, and more.  Visual COBOL 6.0 features more support for new API development, new refactoring tools, and expanded support for Docker containers, Kubernetes and the cloud. Additional d

The Hidden Costs of Developing a Mobile Application Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

More and more companies are realizing just how valuable a mobile application can be for their businesses. However, they also tend to make a very common mistake: they begin development without considering all of the costs associated with the process. Depending on the specifications and requirements, software development companies pricing for mobile app development and deployment can range from $2,000 to $250,000. This price may sound a bit staggering for those just getting started with the process, but a lot more goes into the process of building an application than just design and development. Types of Mobile Applications Before diving into the unexpected costs associated with application development, it is important to note that there are three distinct types of mobile apps: Native Application: A native application is installed on a device itself and distributed through the platform’’s app store. Mobile Web Application: A newer application version, a mobile web app or “HTML 5

Value stream is not as easy as it seems

It is time to start rethinking your value streams.  Lance Knight, COO of ConnectALL , said the industry is making value stream management sound so much simpler than it really is, when in reality it requires teams to start thinking deeper and differently about how their work flows.  The problem is that organizations are looking at it from a manufacturing or linear perspective, and not entirely from the software development perspective. In software development, value streams are organic, where in manufacturing it is all planned.  In manufacturing, when a team is working on a physical good, there is a materials manager that manages the shop floor and all the things that flow through it. According to Knight, that manager makes sure the team has all the materials necessary to complete the job. In that space, there are two kinds of flows. One is the materials around the shop floor, and the other is the work item that goes along with the materials.  In software development, the work effo

Microsoft and Harvard collaborate on differential privacy

Microsoft and the OpenDP Initiative at Harvard have collaborated on a new platform that will offer differential privacy for large datasets. Differential privacy allows researchers to analyze datasets without having important data withheld, while also preserving the privacy of that data, according to Microsoft.  “Differential privacy, the heart of today’s landmark milestone, was invented at Microsoft Research a mere 15 years ago. In the life cycle of transformative research, the field is still young. I am excited to see what this platform will make possible,” said Cynthia Dwork, Gordon McKay professor of CS at Harvard and Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft. RELATED CONTENT: Microsoft sets plan to bridge “data divide” According to Microsoft, data analysis is necessary to come up with solutions for the major issues facing us today, such as climate change, racial inequality, and COVID-19. According to John Kahan, chief data analytics officer at Microsoft, however, the deeper into a

SD Times news digest: Perforce’s JRebel and XRebel plugin, .NET 5.0 preview 6, and PHP 8.0 alpha 1

Perforce announced a new combined plugin that will allow Java developers to use JRebel productivity and performance tools in Eclipse IDE. According to the company, packaging JRebel and XRebel will help developers accelerate the time to market for high performance Java applications. JRebel is a Java plugin that allows developers to skip redeploys during development and XRebel helps developers trace transactions end-to-end in distributed applications. “By saving money with a free IDE like Eclipse, development teams can start looking at other ways to improve productivity,” said Curtis Johnson, the product manager for JRebel and XRebel, “The JRebel/XRebel plugin for Eclipse offers a streamlined, high-ROI option.” Additional details on the new release are available here . .NET 5.0 preview 6 now available .NET preview 6 contains a small set of new feature and performance improvements.  The Preview 6 SDK now includes support for Windows Forms and Microsoft said it is still working on a

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: MLflow

MLflow, the open-source machine learning platform created by Databricks, has joined the Linux Foundation. The version update MLflow 1.9.1 was also released this week with bug fixes and improvements. The project has seen more than two million downloads per month and is growing fourfold every year. The project was first introduced at Spark + AI Summit two years ago.  “The rate of adoption demonstrates the need for an open-source approach to standardizing the ML lifecycle,” said Michael Dolan, the vice president of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation. “Our experience in working with the largest open-source projects in the world shows that an open governance model allows for faster innovation and adoption through broad industry contribution and consensus building.” The Linux Foundation found that previous ways to build, train, tune, deploy, and manage machine models were extremely difficult for data scientists and developers.  MLflow prevents this process from becoming overwhelm

Top 5 Best Coding Apps in 2020 Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

We humans may be a little cunning and mischievous (nervous laugh!) but we surely are focused on various things. And when we are focused on something, we give it full priority to we matter it completely. Right? One of such things on which we are fully focused is learning. Our brain is a powerhouse which is always ready to take in information. And this capability of the brain makes us capable to learning whole new things each and every second. Human brain is always eager to learn anything new which seems right! And the discovery of technology has bright with it a lot of mysteries and unsolved puzzles which, to be honest, can take millions of years to be revealed completely. So, it will not be wrong to say that we have a lot to learn. And with technology came various technical gadgets, our of which the must important are computers and laptops. In simple words, we can describe a computer as a combination of thousands of transistors. Now, we know communication is a big thing. We humans c

Amazon announces no-code solution Honeycode

Amazon is joining the no-code space with the announcement of Honeycode. The new solution is designed to make it easier for developers to build mobile and web applications with no programming required.  Instead of relying on methods like emailing spreadsheets or documents, Honeycode enables developers to use a simple visual application builder and to utilize the AWS-built database to perform tasks like tracking data over time and notifying users of any change, the company explained. RELATED CONTENT: No-code mobile app development: Do more with less AWS found that while people often prefer custom programming, the demand often outstrips developer capacity, and the chasm between using spreadsheets and building custom applications creates a situation where customers often experience unnecessary inefficiency, waste, and inaction. “What customers want is the ability to create applications using the simplicity and familiarity of a spreadsheet, but with the data management capability of a

Perl 7 announced, expected within the next year

After releasing Perl 5.32 earlier this month, the Perl community is already looking towards the next release of the language, which will be Perl 7. According to a blog post written by Perl book author brian d foy on the Perl website, “Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly.” What this means is that functionality is very similar to Perl 5.32, but Perl 7 will offer more modern defaults. Foy went on to explain that Perl is a “Do what I mean” language, which worked well in its early days, but after years of adding new features and the technical landscape becoming more complex, it’s not so simple anymore. Perl now requires a lot of boilerplate code to get started, and the new defaults in Perl 7 should hopefully eliminate some of that.  There aren’t a lot of new additions to Perl 7 other than making certain features default. Some of the features likely to be removed include indirect object notation, bareword filehandles, fake multidimensional arrays and hashes, and Perl 4-style prototyp

Eggplant gets acquired by Keysight Technologies

The digital automation intelligence company Eggplant is joining Keysight Technologies, a technology company that focuses on helping enterprises, service providers and governments innovate in a secure way. Together, the companies hope to advance the automated software test market. Eggplant’s software test automation platform leverages artificial intelligence and analytics to automate test creation and test execution. Keysight’s solutions optimize networks and help bring products to market faster and at lower costs. It features designed simulation, prototype validation, manufacturing test, and optimization in networks and cloud environments.  “Joining forces with Keysight gives Eggplant the ability to scale our intelligent automation platform and reach more organizations across the globe,” said Dr. John Bates, CEO of Eggplant. “We share a vision to accelerate innovation and together we will be able to help customers on their digital transformation journey. We’re proud of what we’ve acc

SD Times news digest: JFrog ChartCenter, GitLab 13.1, and Hasura Cloud public beta announced

JFrog released ChartCenter, a free, central repository of public Helm charts for the developer community.   Developers can search among thousands of Kubernetes-ready packages to find the ones they need and discover and launch applications distributed across many public repositories.  “Your Helm CLI can pull all the public Helm charts you use from a single, central place with certainty, and be your single source of truth,” JFrog wrote in a post . GitLab 13.1 released GitLab 13.1 expands alert management capabilities and offers new tools to track and improve code quality.  GitLab’s Alert Management aggregates and ranks IT alerts from all of your services to simplify assessment and remediation. Code coverage tracking over time surfaces quality trends to developers and managers alike, and native code intelligence boosts the speed and accuracy of code reviews by integrating reference material directly into GitLab. Additional details on the new release are available here . Hasura C

Angular 10 now available

The Angular team has announced a major version of the web framework. Angular 10 covers the entire platform, framework, Angular Material and CLI.  Traditionally, the team releases two major versions every year to coincide with the JavaScript ecosystem and provide a predictable schedule for developers. Angular 9 was just released 4 months ago, and the team is already looking to release Angular 11 in the fall.  Key features of the release include: New data range picker Warnings about CommonJS imports that can slow down large applications Optional stricter settings that can improve maintainability, help catch bugs, and enable advanced optimizations TypeScript 3.9 TSLib 2.0 TSLint 6 New default browser configuration In addition, the team revealed an increased investment with the community. For instance, the team has decreased its open issue count by more than 700 issues, and addressed more than 2,000 issues in the last three weeks.  Angular 10 also deprecates and removes a

Android development team releases new ML Kit SDK

The Android development team is adding new features to its ML Kit, which is currently being used in over 25,000 iOS and Android apps.  ML Kit is the company’s solution for integrating machine learning into mobile applications. It was launched in 2018 at its I/O conference. The team is introducing a new SDK that doesn’t rely on Firebase like the original version of the ML Kit did. According to the team, they got feedback from users that they wanted something more flexible. The new SDK includes all of the same on-device APIs, and developers can still choose to use ML Kit and Firebase together if they choose.  According to the team, this change makes ML Kit fully focused on on-device machine learning. The benefits of this over cloud ML include speed, the ability to work offline, and more privacy.  The Android development team is recommending that developers using ML Kit for Firebase’s on-device APIs migrate to the standalone SDK. Details on how to do so can be found in their migratio

Data Theorem releases full-stack security analyzer for modern web apps and cloud services

Data Theorem released a new full-stack security analyzer called Web Secure. It is designed to provide vulnerability analysis for modern web applications from the web layer down to its embedded APIs and cloud resources.  According to the company, the analyzer was built for DevOps and security teams to improve web application security testing, and help identify and remediate potential data breaches in modern web applications, also known as Single-Page Applications (SPAs). “The current generation of web security tools are poorly suited to address these newer application frameworks, APIs and cloud microservices that are the underpinnings of these modern applications,” Data Theorem stated in a post . “Data Theorem’s Web Secure was designed specifically to help customers secure their modern web applications.” The solution contains a new type of dynamic and run-time analysis that is fully integrated into the CI/CD process, and enables organizations to conduct continuous, automated se

SD Times news digest: Bugsnag Stability Center launched, PDFTron acquires ActivePDF, and dotnet-monitor released

Bugsnag has announced its new Stability Center focused on providing a holistic view into stability stats and trends across releases for multiple client and server-side applications. According to the company,  the center will help engineering and product leaders can make data-driven decisions about when to prioritize debugging over new development to improve app stability and customer experience,. The Stability Center features a card for each project being managed, which displays a 30-day stability score, indicator, and stability trend graph with target stability. It also includes the current error count and change in error count over the past seven days. PDFTron acquires ActivePDF The deal builds upon PDFTron’s first acquisition of San Jose-based BCL Technologies just three months ago in March 2020. The company aims to provide a leading document technology platform that powers digital transformations.  “Combining PDFTron’s market-leading client-side technology and document SDKs wi

11 Best Node Js Books in 2020 Pratik Sah The Crazy Programmer

When we talk about any programming language, it’s very easy to find any video course on Udemy or YouTube but when trying to learn from books, it is one of the most difficult tasks to find a book that will be helpful for us and easy to understand. For a beginner who is just starting with programming, I would recommend you to first start with C as it is one of the oldest programming languages and it is going to help you in developing your logical skill. Here are some of the handpicked books on C programming language written by some of the best authors out there. In this post, we are going to look at some of the best books for learning Node Js and these books are specially handpicked and a lot of time has been dedicated while picking each of the books in the list here. Also read How to Install Node.js on Windows, Mac or Linux. 11 Best Node Js Books in 2020 Get Programming with Node.js This book has 37 fast-paced and fun lessons full of practicals and if you have js skills, you a