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GrapeCity, a global provider of award-winning enterprise software development tools, is pleased to announce the SpreadJS v16 software release. The highlights of SpreadJS v16 include exciting features, such as a new file format, support for Excel-like form controls, new features for TableSheet, a high-performance, enterprise-grade DataTable add-on, and much more. These features expand developers’ capabilities within their JavaScript applications when building high-performance enterprise spreadsheets. SpreadJS v16 is now available as an upgrade for existing customers and a download for new customers on the  GrapeCity website. SpreadJS v16 introduces a new JavaScript spreadsheet file format, .sjs. With this new format, JavaScript developers can more efficiently work with large complex files much faster and produce smaller file sizes when saved. The .sjs format is a zipped file that contains multiple smaller JSON files, similar to the Excel XML structure. It can be imported and exported j

In GitLab 15.9, administrators will now be able to specify files, file types, or directories that need specific types of approval. They can set approval as optional, required approval by one user, or required approval by multiple users. Approval by multiple users is a new feature itself. Previously if you did have that requirement you would have to create an approval rule and now it is handled by the Code Owners file. Approval rules apply to entire branches, but Code Owners rules can be applied to specific parts of code.   “So, the multiple approvals would have also been required for changes that do not need a high level of scrutiny leading to unnecessary reviews,” explained Christen Dybenko, senior product manager at GitLab, wrote in a blog post .  Another update to do with approvals is license approval policies, which is intended to replace the deprecated License-Check feature, though GitLab has stated the two can be used simultaneously. With license approval policies, users can

Building a website can be an exciting prospect for businesses and individuals alike. However, it can also be a daunting task, especially if you don’t have the necessary technical expertise. Many challenges exist, from designing the site to ensuring its functionality and security, which is where outsourcing website development comes in. Outsourcing website development allows you to avoid the headaches and challenges of building a website yourself. Whether you’re a small business owner or an individual looking to establish an online presence, outsourcing can provide you with access to technical expertise, cost savings, and more.  This article will explore why people outsource web application development and how it can help you overcome common pain points associated with website building. 1. Access to Expertise and Technical Skills Outsourcing website development allows businesses to tap into professional developers’ expertise and technical skills. These developers have the knowled

The need for the digital transformation of business processes, operations, and products is nearly ubiquitous. This is putting development teams under immense pressure to accelerate software releases, despite time and budget constraints. At the same time, compliance with data privacy and protection mandates, as well as other risk mitigation efforts (e.g., zero trust), often choke the rate of innovation by making it harder for development teams to acquire and use high-quality test data. Is it possible to achieve both of these seemingly opposing requirements, speed and protection?  The answer lies in a familiar tactic: automation. Development teams are increasingly adept at automating huge chunks of their work, from setting up the necessary infrastructure environments to building, integrating, testing, and releasing software. Call it DevOps or CI/CD, the tactic is the same: ruthlessly automate mundane or repetitive tasks. To ensure compliance requirements don’t hinder development, IT le

APITable is an API-oriented visual database created to help developers build collaborative apps. The maintainers consider it to be “the best Airtable open-source alternative.” The platform provides an advanced technology stack, which allows multiple users to edit together in real-time or with the ‘Operational Transformation’ algorithm. It also includes a user-friendly database spreadsheet interface and database-native architecture through Changeset / Operation / Action / Snapshot. The database spreadsheet UI enables users to use separated workspaces in place of App/Base-based structure and make unlimited tables link together. It includes dark mode and theme customization in addition to seven view types and a one-click API panel.  Users can also activate row permissions with a single click through the Mirror functionality. APITable is easily extensible and allows users to customize graph and chart dashboards, data column types, automation robot actions and more.  It comes equipped

Rapid growth is a great measure of a company’s success, but it comes with potentially serious growing pains that can hurt collaboration and overall effectiveness of your teams.  Here, rapid scaling means hiring more people to maintain a consistent growth rate, since headcount growth follows revenue. For instance, hiring more developers to build new features that will generate new revenue, then expanding the sales team that will sell these new features, which leads to hiring customer success managers to support these new users. This comes with three major problems: We need to scale product, people and processes at the same time. You can’t just scale one thing and keep the others unchanged. With processes, it’s critical to remember that what works for 10 people won’t work for 25 and so on. The more your team expands, the more your processes need to be streamlined. Additionally, fast growth depends on your company’s ability to hire well and onboard quickly, which also relies on the effi

1. It’s Freedom of Creativity Many people think you need A’s in math to program. That’s a misconception. Programming is more about logic and creativity. For example, you and your friends jokingly come up with an excellent smartphone game. You can wait for some company over the ocean to release it or make it yourself. You decide how this game will work and what the rules, interface, and functions will be. With programming skills comes the opportunity to create a product from scratch or implement an idea – an application, a website, a program – the way you need it. 2. It Pays Off A simple truth: the more skills you have, your services are more expensive. For example, each  paper writer who can design simple HTML-pages, accountants, or managers who can automate Excel or Access with the help of code cost more than their colleagues with only a basic set of skills. Large companies are increasing and are looking for new ways to optimize. Hiring a team of developers and paying each $2,00

The focus of . NET 7 was to unify .NET Core and .NET Framework into a single .NET. Now that this has been achieved, .NET 8 is free to focus on other areas. According to Microsoft, with .NET 8 they want to focus on the developer experience for cloud-native developers and cross-platform development with MAUI and Blazor, as well as continued performance improvements.  “We believe .NET developers should be able to get their apps to the cloud quickly, scale their apps without compromising performance, and evolve their apps based on actionable data and feedback about your apps in production. We’ll invest in making it easier to manage the full end-to-end experience from local development and testing through continuous integration and deployment. Our goal is to make it easier to implement microservice architectures and build and deploy containers,” Jeremy Likness, principal program manager for .NET Web Frameworks, wrote in a blog post .  To support cloud-native developers, Microsoft is wor

SmartBear, provider of software development and visibility tools, today introduced the new SwaggerHub Explore in order to provide developers with instant access to RESTful and Apache Kafka endpoints.   SwaggerHub Explore is a part of the SmartBear API Developer Lifecycle platform and an integrated part of SwaggerHub that enables developers to learn more about API behaviors, allowing them to cut back on time and effort during the integration process. This release brings developers a free API exploration tool that allows them to speed up the development lifecycle by offering the ability to visualize API data in one place as well as evaluate functionality prior to investing time in API integration.  According to SmartBear, this is a major developer challenge that SwaggerHub Explore is intended to fix while also speeding up the development of high-quality software with limited resources. “SwaggerHub Explore is a developer-centric tool that brings new innovation to the SmartBear API

Microsoft incorporated a number of features into this release that are designed to reduce friction in daily development workflows.  A number of productivity enhancements were made, including all-in-one search and Intent-Based Suggestions. All-in-one search enables Visual Studio users to find files, types, and members in code. With this release the company has significantly improved the underlying infrastructure so that results are better ordered by how relevant they are. Search also now has a Preview Panel that will provide better context for search results.  Intent-Based Suggestions provides suggestions based on recent changes in the code. It utilizes AI to try to understand repeated edits of code and suggests more changes that are inline with those.  Enhancements to Razor and C# include support for code actions, such as shortcuts like “Remove Tag” and “Insert Image height/width,” and improved performance during project configuration, code analysis recognition, and when typing.

When creating a platform engineering team, an important first step is the interview process. What do developers want and need? What works, and what doesn’t?  Sounds like what companies do when reaching out to customers about new rollouts, right? Well, it is, when you consider your development team as being customers of the platform. “Treat your developers, treat your DevOps teams, as your own internal customer and interview them,” urged Bill Manning, Solution Engineering Manager at JFrog, which has created an end-to-end Software Supply Chain platform to speed secure delivery of new applications and features. Once you’ve listened to the developers, Manning went on, you can roll their feedback right into the next iteration. This feedback helps organizations find ways to be more efficient, and to create more value by reducing costs – a practice today known as continuous improvement. The reason platform engineering is becoming so important is that the days of each little team having the

It started with working from home. That’s what fired off the rocket of digital transformation.   People who converted to virtual interactions with their customers did well, and those who didn’t suffered. But to do so, and keep up with those virtual competitors, often meant exposing things before they were ready, or even fully thought out. That led to a lot of technical debt, yet still didn’t calm the need for speed.   If you look to the Facebook-type models of extremely rapid releases, you’d need a highly scalable infrastructure with a rigorous testing environment – which on its face seems anathema to digital transformation –  to give you the ability to rapidly stand things up to test, and to perform those tests.   So, with your business online and on the line, it’s almost impossible to keep testing at a pace the business needs to adhere to without employing automation.   So said Arthur Hicken, evangelist at test solutions provider Parasoft, in a discussion we had leading up to

The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) has recently announced the open source availability of its Common Domain Model (CDM) project in partnership with the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, International Capital Market Association, and International Securities Lending Association. According to FINOS, this project is intended to reinforce the foundation’s commitment to enabling collaboration and innovation within the fintech industry as well as offer members the opportunity to enhance industry standards. The CDM has been fully integrated into the FINOS project landscape, according to FINOS. CDM works to streamline and automate lifecycle events and processes related to derivatives, fixed income and securities lending transactions, reduce costs, and improve interoperability. “FINOS is very proud and excited to launch open collaboration on the CDM and to evolve the model to become the standard for financial objects and events modeling,” said Jane Gavronsky, chief oper

GrapeCity, a global provider of award-winning enterprise software development tools, is pleased to announce ComponentOne 2022 v3, the final major software release of the year. The highlights of this release include .NET 7 support across the entire product line, a first look at the FlexGrid for MAUI preview, enhancements for design-time editors and designers for .NET 6+ controls, and much more. The successor to .NET 6, .NET 7, focuses on being unified, modern, simple, and fast. Microsoft will support .NET 7 for 18 months as standard-term support (STS). As part of the ComponentOne 2022 v3 release, the team has added .NET 7 support for the entire product line. ComponentOne’s latest .NET 6 libraries will work in .NET 7 for all platforms to allow customers to upgrade when they are ready.  Read the release  announcement to learn more about ComponentOne’s .NET 7 support. In the 2022 v3 release, the same .NET datagrid, FlexGrid, that thousands of developers have used for decades has been dev

The automated testing platform Code Intelligence recently announced that it has integrated its open-source JavaScript fuzz testing engine, Jazzer.js , into Jest , a unit testing framework for JavaScript. Jazzer.js is a free, coverage-guided, in-process fuzzer spanning the Node.js platform. It is currently available within JavaScript’s node package manager. With this, developers can use Jest for both functional and security testing without the need to leave their development environment.  According to the company, the integration offers developers the ability to run automated security tests that are complementary to their existing unit tests and allows them to test JavaScript applications for hidden bugs. Code Intelligence also stated that it will be bringing the ability to receive specialized bug detectors for critical vulnerabilities to Jazzer.js. These include remote executions, cross-site-scripting, and injections.  “While most JavaScript developers already use Jest for funct

Tricentis is attempting to meet the growing demand for high quality mobile applications by releasing Testim Mobile, a mobile extension to its testing platform Testim . According to Tricentis, testing for mobile applications can pose a lot of challenges, because unlike browsers, phones and tablets can vary widely in performance, size, and operating system.  With Testim Mobile, testers can use either physical devices or emulators in testing, and tests can also be run in parallel across those different testing options.  Devices can be set up and configured in minutes using the Tricentis Mobile Agent, which helps to also simplify device management.  Testers using Windows are able to still test iOS devices from their laptops by connecting the devices to the Mobile Agent.  For testers looking to utilize an emulator or simulator instead of physical devices, they can upload apps into the cloud and then share them with other team members too.  It also allows for codeless authoring of tes

Microsoft’s prompt engine is a library for helping developers create prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs). Prompt engineering, a technique for enabling specific behavior out of LLMs like GPT-3 and Codex, involves crafting inputs that coax the model to produce certain kinds of outputs. Also, few-shot prompting is a discipline that provides examples of inputs and outputs, so the model has a reference for the type of output desired. Prompt engineering can include formatting a question and passing it to the model, but can also require substantial code to manipulate and update strings.  Microsoft created this library to codify patterns and practices around prompt engineering, according to the project’s GitHub page .  The library currently supports three distinct engines, one of which is Prompt Engine. The Code Engine creates prompts for Natural Language to Code scenarios and Chat Engine creates prompts with descriptions and examples. The project offers a way to represent prompts a

The team at Microsoft has announced an extension in Visual Studio that allows users to upgrade their .NET Framework or .NET Core web and desktop applications directly within Visual Studio.  According to the blog post , if a user’s application is built for .NET Framework or .NET Core, now is the time to upgrade to .NET 6 (Long Term Support version) or .NET 7 (Standard Term Support version) in order to gain performance enhancements as well as access to new features and capabilities. After the Upgrade Assistant extension is installed, customers are enabled to upgrade every type of .NET application from any initial version by right-clicking on the project in Solution Explorer and choosing “Upgrade.” The team stated that Upgrade Assistant is intended to take care of the mechanics, however, depending on what framework and project type a user is upgrading from, they should expect to do some manual post-processing to be sure that no breaking changes were missed. In the latest version, t

Are you planning to start a career in the field of cyber security ? If so, this article is what you need to read! An expert in cyber security serves the same purpose that a guard dog does in the physical world. Experts in cybersecurity are often employed by private companies and public institutions to safeguard the integrity of the latter’s computer networks and the confidentiality of sensitive data. The primary responsibility of a cybersecurity specialist is to keep an eye on the organization’s computer networks and to report any security flaws or other problems that they find to higher management. In addition to this, they are obligated to anticipate possible risks and provide direction for how to deal with them. What May Encompass the Field of Cyber Security? It’s possible for a cybersecurity specialist to be required to fill a variety of responsibilities, depending on the nature of the company or organization they work for. Experts in cybersecurity, as their name indicates, are

While many people are interested in pursuing a career in STEM, a lot of them don’t feel super familiar with the career options in the field.  According to a study based on 14,000 interviews conducted by IBM and Morning Consult, 40% of respondents stated they don’t know where to start to make this career change.  More than half of the respondents said they were not aware of the careers that would be considered STEM, and 62% had concerns about finding a job that pays enough to support themselves or their families.  In addition, 61% don’t think they are qualified for roles in STEM because they don’t have the right academic degrees. About the same number (60%) fear that obtaining digital credentials would be too costly. However, of those who have obtained digital credentials, 86% said that the education helped them meet their career goals.  “Technology training can have a transformational effect on a person’s life,” said Justina Nixon-Saintil, chief impact officer at IBM. “There are m

Puppet Enterprise 2023.0 is the latest release following 2021.7 that includes NIST compliance, the ability to authenticate users in multiple Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) domains, adds a streamlined user interface, and more.  With NIST compliance, Puppet Enterprise 2023.0 reduces compliance risk and the risk of sensitive information being accessed. Users can customize the timeout to specify a default value and issue a confirmation message. A prioritized list of LDAP servers also bolsters security.  The new user interface includes a new job and task queue status, task concurrency fine-tuning, default job timeouts, and the ability to stop stalled jobs. These new features will increase observability, throughput, fault tolerance, and operational efficiency, according to Puppet Scalability has also been improved with updates to reporting, database performance, and agent certificate regeneration as well as new orchestrator task concurrency defaults.  Puppet Enterprise 2023

The 2023 Call for Code, a global program that invites developers around the world to contribute to open-source technology projects that address social and humanitarian issues, has recently been announced by creator David Clark, founding partner IBM, charitable partner United Nations Human Rights, and program affiliate the Linux Foundation. This year’s Call for Code is intended to encourage the development of AI-powered technology projects that target sustainability issues in order to fight against climate change.  According to Clark, Call for Code 2023 challenges developers around the world, students, and startups to build and contribute to solutions that help push sustainability forward by improving resource management, reducing pollution, and protecting biodiversity.  Additionally, this year the Call for Code Global Challenge will transition from a single global challenge to several “Challenge Rounds” spanning all through 2023. In each round, teams will compete for cash prizes out

Databricks, provider of a cloud-based data engineering tool for processing and transforming large amounts of data, today announced the Visual Studio Code extension for Databricks . According to the company, this new extension will allow developers to write their code locally utilizing the editing capabilities of VS Code, connect to Databricks clusters and run code remotely, and use the software development best practices of source code control, unit testing, and CI/CD right from their IDE.  This comes as the first of several planned releases and updates geared towards teams who have standardized on using IDEs for their development processes.  Databricks stated that it has constructed a new team to focus specifically on the breadth of the developer ecosystem, and it will be rolling out support for additional IDEs as well as other tools that allow developers to have full access to the data lakehouse from third party products.  “With all your data in one place, you can utilize approp

The testing company SmartBear announced a new tool that will help developers more easily discover visual bugs and defects so that they can deliver applications and websites with their intended look intact. VisualTest utilizes AI in its regression testing to discover these visual errors. It also provides visibility into development components across the software development life cycle.  It automatically takes screenshots of the application, compares it to previous versions, and highlights any visual changes that are present. Because VisualTest makes use of AI, it is able to track several types of visual changes while ignoring false positives.  According to SmartBear, existing visual testing methods are “unreliable, time consuming, and cumbersome to maintain,” and applying AI is necessary to solve these common problems.  The new tool integrates with BitBar , which is SmartBear’s mobile and web testing tool. SmartBear believes that integration will help reduce the need to context