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The web development company Netlify has revealed that it acquired Stackbit , a company that provides a no-code visual interface for editing web pages and applications.  According to Netlify, over the past several years, web development platforms have been increasing adding features to increase developer productivity, and now companies are in search of similar functionality for marketers and product managers. It hopes to provide this with the capabilities of Stackbit. By incorporating Stackbit into its web development tools Netlify will be able to provide users the ability to update existing websites and applications without needing coding experience.   Stackbit can pull in data from any headless CMS, content source, or custom data source. Then users can update objects through the UI and have those changes automatically applied to the original source.  As a result, Netlify customers will now be able to easily update web copy, make edits, localize content, and more. Marketers will

Open VSX Registry is an open source alternative to the Visual Studio Marketplace. Developers can use it to search for extensions for editors that support VS code extensions, such as Eclipse Che, Eclipse Theia, Salesforce Code Builder, Google Cloud Workstations, Gitpod, and SAP Business Application Studio.   It was created by the Eclipse Foundation. Companies can contribute their own extensions to the registry, and the registry can also be self-hosted internally to give developers access to extensions.  The registry currently has about 3,000 extensions from over 1,500 different publishers. Since the project’s release in 2021, over 40 million extensions have been downloaded, with over 2 million being downloaded every month.  Recently the Eclipse Foundation announced that because of significant growth to the project, they would be forming a working group around the project. The Open VSX Working Group will manage and accelerate adoption of the project.  “By creating a vendor-neutral

Databricks made the announcements yesterday at its Data + AI Summit , which brought together experts from Databricks and across the industry as a whole to discuss data and AI.  One of the announcements was that the company added new features to Lakehouse AI, which is a data-centric platform for building generative AI applications.   One of the new features is Vector Search, which allows developers to use embedded search when developing generative AI solutions, which helps improve the accuracy of responses.  They have also added a low-code way to fine-tune LLMs and a curated list of open-source models for getting started with generative AI.  The company also announced new capabilities in Lakehouse Federation in Unity Catalog , which is a data and AI governance solution for data lakehouses. It now has new querying capabilities that allow customers to consolidate and map data assets from all the platforms they are using. Customers can also now set up consistent access policies for

As our main character learns more about cybersecurity, a constantly changing and growing field, they are amazed by the potent blend of artificial intelligence and digital defense. This coming together is like a symphony of complicated algorithms or a complicated dance where people and machines work together. AI has become a digital superhero that keeps our virtual worlds safe by being able to recognise threats and act on them automatically. Join our main characters on this journey as they discover the exciting worlds of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI). Together, they will find the amazing things AI can do, look into possible risks, and cast light on a bright future as we look for new ways to keep our digital world safe. Image Source Intelligent Detection of Threats AI is a key part of finding and stopping online threats faster and more accurately than ever. Machine learning algorithms look at a lot of data for trends and outliers that could be signs of bad behaviour

With value stream management becoming more mainstream in organizations looking to better align IT initiatives with business priorities, SD Times had the chance to produce a webinar with two of the members of the team at Allstacks, which has created a value stream intelligence platform – Adam Dahlgren, COO and head of product, and Parker Ennis, director of product marketing. We discuss cross-functional metrics and analysis, strategic priorities and a lot more. Here is an abridged transcript of that conversation: SDT: We’ve been covering the software development industry for 20 years here at SD Times, and one of the biggest hurdles we always heard about was the disconnect between IT and what business wanted, because they were using different tools, didn’t speak the same language, and couldn’t have insights into the other side as to what’s needed. So value stream intelligence seems to be the long-awaited bridge to get the two sides to come together. But yet, this still seems to be kind o

This is according to Postman’s 2023 State of the API report, which revealed that nearly two-thirds of respondents are generating revenue from their APIs. Of those, 43% generate over a quarter of their company’s revenue through APIs. Respondents judged the success of APIs by how much revenue they bring in, which is the second measure of success behind usage.  API users also view price as a top consideration for 47% of respondents when deciding whether or not to integrate with an API. For the past two years it had been at 41% of respondents, and Postman believes this increase is a result of the current economic situation.  Investment in APIs is also going strong, with 92% of respondents believing investment will rise or stay the same over the next two years, possibly indicating that some believe that the worst of the economic downturn in tech is over.  There was also an increase in the number of companies who self-identify as “API-first leaders,” which are those who excel in metric

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) announced the launch of OWASP CycloneDX version 1.5, a new standard in the Bill of Materials (BOM) domain that specifically targets issues of transparency and compliance within the software industry.  CycloneDX v1.5 goes beyond established standards, by introducing ML transparency (ML-BOM), Formulation (MBOM), and enhanced support for SBOM quality indicators.  This release extends the BOM beyond its current support for hardware, software, and services. The objective is to provide organizations with a more robust capability for identifying and mitigating supply chain risks. ML-BOM is considered an advancement in BOM technology that is beneficial to developers. Through ML-BOM, CycloneDX delivers insights regarding the machine learning models used in software systems. This increased level of transparency enables stakeholders to gain a comprehensive understanding of the training and deployment methods utilized. This not only guaran

The Eclipse Foundation revealed the establishment of the Open VSX Working Group. This new group’s mandate is to supervise and expedite the adoption of the Open VSX Registry, a vendor-neutral, community-backed alternative to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Marketplace. Derived from the Eclipse Open VSX open-source initiative, the Open VSX Registry presently houses close to 3,000 extensions provided by over 1,500 unique publishers. With new additions happening daily, the registry has seen substantial growth since its launch in 2021, reaching over 40 million extension downloads and now surpassing 2 million downloads every month.  To ensure efficient handling of this escalating growth, control of the Open VSX Registry will transition from the Eclipse Cloud DevTools Working Group to the newly established group. The founding members of this new group include Google, Huawei, Posit, Salesforce, Siemens, STMicroelectronics, and more. “The Open VSX Registry has experienced significant momentum at t

Data privacy automation company Integral introduced its inaugural open-source project, Robin AI . This tool scrutinizes code modifications and offers recommendations for improvement, thereby bolstering the quality of the code. Initially, Robin AI was an internal utility designed to provide feedback on code resembling that which a human would give, in order to aid Integral’s developers in crafting resilient and efficient code. “Because it serves as a trusty partner in enhancing the code development processes, we named the project after Batman’s sidekick Robin,” said John Kuhn, co-founder and CTO at Integral. “It has served us well in boosting product velocity and reducing production bugs for Integral’s engineering team. By open-sourcing the software, we hope that developers worldwide can automate and optimize their code change reviews, increasing quality and productivity.” Robin AI employs GPT-driven advanced natural language processing abilities to evaluate changes in code. The uti

Application performance monitoring (APM) company New Relic has announced the release of New Relic APM 360, which is a new comprehensive monitoring tool that helps developers understand the upstream and downstream impacts of issues, discover emerging trends, and prevent issues.  According to the company, traditional APM tools often have to deal with siloed data, no context for issues, and blind spots. This solution overcomes all of those challenges and offers a unified view of telemetry data across the organization. It provides insights on critical health indicators, such as issues, deployments, service levels, and vulnerabilities. These insights are all displayed on one screen to eliminate context switching.  It also correlates infrastructure insights, error user impact, log patterns, and distributed tracing with the golden signals of monitoring (latency, traffic, errors, and saturation). This makes it easier to troubleshoot issues, as it eliminates a lot of guesswork.  New Relic A

MongoDB yesterday added new capabilities to its MongoDB Atlas developer data platform, including generative AI, stream processing and more. The details were announced at the company’s developer conference in New York City. MongoDB Atlas Vector Search now uses generative AI to create highly relevant data retrieval and personalization into applications for improved customer experiences, the company said in its announcement.  The company also said it enhanced MongoDB Search Nodes to provide a dedicated  infrastructure for search use cases, enabling customers to scale the infrastructure independent of the database. This helps them more flexibly and efficiently manage unforeseen spikes and high-throughput workloads. MongoDB Atlas Stream Processing helps developers build event-driven applications by unifying how they handle data in motion and at rest; MongoDB Time Series collections now have significant scaling and efficiency improvements; and MongoDB Atlas Data Federation and Online Arch

The maintainers of the web development language Svelte have announced the stable release of Svelte 4 .  It has been over four years since Svelte 3 came out, and since then there have been a number of updates to Node.js and browser APIs, and Svelte 4 includes updates to take advantage of those capabilities.  First off, it offers performance improvements, such as a package size reduction of 75%. The team says the people who will notice this the most include those loading the interactive learning experience on learn.svelte.dev , users of the Svelte REPL, and users with limited connectivity.  They have also reduced the number of dependencies in the language from 61 to 16, leading to both faster downloads and reduced risk of supply chain attacks.  Another major focus on this release is developer experience. The process of authoring custom elements has been overhauled and is now more intuitive and consistent. The IDE authoring experience was also updated, with cmd+click now takes you t

Build Your Own X is an open-source collection of blog posts, tutorials, and resources that teach you how to recreate popular technologies using different programming languages.  The idea is that you will become a better programmer or work on mastering a language through the exercise of building an existing technology.   According to Stack Overflow’s 2023 Developer Survey , 80% of developers use online resources to learn to code, up from 70% in 2022 and 60% in 2021.   The collection includes resources for building the following technologies: 3D renderers, augmented reality, BitTorrent clients, blockchain and cryptocurrency, bots, command-line tools, databases, Docker, emulators and virtual machines, front-end frameworks, games, Git, network stacks, neural networks, operating systems, physics engines, programming languages, Regex engines, search engines, Shell, template engines, text editors, visual recognition systems, voxel engines, web browsers, and web servers. The tutorials sp

Shop Pay is a feature that helps save time during checkout by allowing customers to save their email address, credit card info, and shipping and billing information so that they don’t have to re-enter it the next time they make a purchase.  This is being made possible through the company’s Commerce Components by Shopify, which launched earlier this year. It provides retailers not on Shopify access to Shopify components like Shopify Payments, ShopifyQL, and Liquid, which is a low-code language for creating storefronts.  According to Shopify, Shop Pay boosts conversion by up to 50% compared to guest checkout, which is 10% more than other accelerated checkout options.  “Enterprises that don’t take advantage of Shop Pay are self-sabotaging. They are leaving money on the table,” said Kaz Nejatian, VP of product and chief operating officer of Shopify. “This is critical optionality in a hyper competitive retail environment. In an economy where big brands are competing more fiercely than ev

AWS unveiled the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center program to support customers in the successful development and implementation of generative AI solutions.  With a significant investment of $100 million, AWS will facilitate collaboration between its AI and ML experts and customers worldwide, providing assistance in conceptualizing, designing, and launching innovative generative AI products, services, and processes.  Various companies are embracing the potential of generative AI to revolutionize their offerings and operational practices, and the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center aims to expedite and enhance the realization of these ideas. The AWS Generative AI Innovation Center is comprised of a team of strategists, data scientists, engineers, and solutions architects who collaborate closely with customers to create customized solutions leveraging the capabilities of generative AI.  For instance with the program, healthcare and life sciences companies can focus on expediting dr

BOSTON – June 22, 2023 –   Mendix , a Siemens business and global leader in modern enterprise application development, today outlined powerful new and robust  AI and machine learning capabilities, including innovative context-aware AI developer tools, which will all be available upon the release of Mendix 10, to be announced during a  live streaming event on June 27th. The new AI and Machine Learning enhancements reinforce the status of Mendix’s low-code platform as the de facto standard for building smart business applications and solutions. Mendix 10 features greatly expanded AI capabilities in two major areas. First, Mendix 10 empowers the enterprise to seamlessly integrate AI use cases with low-code applications using Mendix’s new Machine Learning Kit. Secondly, the platform greatly expands the scope and functionality of AI-enabled application development. Infusing low-code applications with AI enablement via Mendix’s Machine Learning Kit    Addressing an urgent market need to i

Everyone, it seems, wants to shift all the steps required to produce and deliver quality, performant software to the left. The assumption is that by asking developers to take on a greater role in quality assurance and security, the cost to remediate problems is lowered by discovering those issues earlier.  The downside of this is that developers now say that they spend not even half of their time on coding, meaning that instead of working on innovative new products or features, they’re learning how to test all aspects of their application or trying to understand how to secure their code. (Thanks, “you build it, you own it!”)   Many of these same developers also report in surveys that testing is a big headache for them. “Rather than reducing stress for developers, shift left has introduced new obstacles,” said Gevorg Hovsepyan, head of product at test automation platform mabl. “They built something. They try to deploy but testing breaks. Then they are responsible for fixing the test,

At its annual conference, HasuraCon, the API and GraphQL company announced a number of new features and products, including the Hasura Data Delivery Network (DDN), Hasura Schema Registry, Hasura Native Data Connector for MongoDB, Native Queries and Logical Models, Open Domain Data Specification (Open DDS) and Native Data Connector (NDC) SDK.  Hasura DDN is an edge network for running low-latency and high-performance data APIs. It automatically reroutes client requests to the closest Hasura instance, which minimizes the round-trip time and reduces latency.  According to Hasura, DDN enables developers to iterate on APIs in under a second. Traditionally, building APIs requires developers to build, validate, and test the code, which is typically hard to do at scale and can take minutes or hours.  It integrates with distributed databases, such as CockroachDB, Amazon Aurora, and YugaByte. DDN will be available soon on Hasura Cloud or can be self-hosted.  Hasura Schema Registry is anothe

Harness launched an AI assistant known as AIDA (AI Development Assistant). The company aims to broaden the scope of AI applications to include all aspects of the SDLC.  According to Harness,  conventional AI tools mainly concentrate on helping with code development, while AIDA enhances the entire process of software development, encompassing activities such as building and testing code, securing the software, guaranteeing reliability, implementing changes, and cost optimization.  This AI assistant is accessible to all Harness clients at no extra cost and will be smoothly incorporated into all aspects of the Harness platform. These aspects include CI/CD, managing cloud-related expenses, and feature toggles. “Harness’s goal has always been to break down barriers in software delivery. With the launch of AIDA, we’re not just talking about a future where AI significantly enhances the SDLC—we’re making it a reality,” said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. “I firmly believe that

Alan Turning was a computer scientist and mathematician. His work played a vital role in the development of modern computing and artificial intelligence. During world war 2 he helped to break the German enigma code that resulted in saving millions of lives. His concept of the Turing machine laid the foundation for the modern computer. In this article, I am sharing some of the best quotes from Alan Turing that I have collected from various sources. Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine. Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible. We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done. A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human. If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books. Codes are a pu

Squarespace has revealed its intention to acquire the assets related to Google Domains.  Google has decided to phase out this segment of its business after a set transition period, prompting this definitive asset purchase agreement with Squarespace. This purchase includes approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers. “In keeping with our efforts to sharpen our focus, we have entered into a definitive agreement with Squarespace for the acquisition of customer accounts of the Google Domains registrar business,” said Matt Madrigal, vice president and general manager of Merchant Shopping at Google. “Supporting a smooth transition for customers over the coming months, with the help of the Google Domains team, is our top priority. Squarespace can provide an integrated experience of purchasing and managing domains along with offering other tools that these customers may need to build their online presence.” As per the agreement, Squarespace

The online learning platform edX hopes to help its students navigate a rapidly changing employment landscape by launching a Career Resource Center . This new online hub will contain tips, tools, and advice from edX’s network of industry experts.  It will include career-specific skill identification, personalized course recommendations, resume-building tools, job search assistance, and access to industry events. Career and industry experts will also write articles that will live on the hub.  The company hopes that the Career Resource Center will expand edX’s impact and help more people find and thrive in meaningful careers.  “In today’s swiftly changing professional world, there’s an undeniable need for comprehensive career support for learners everywhere,” said Anant Agarwal, founder of edX and chief platform officer at 2U (edX’s parent company). “Through the new edX Career Resource Center, our aim is not just to help people thrive in their present roles but also to help them bui

The World Wide Web Consortium today announced a standardization milestone for a new browser capability that helps to streamline user authentication and enhance payment security during Web checkout.  Secure Payment Confirmation  ( SPC ) enables merchants, banks, payment service providers, card networks, and others to lower the friction of strong customer authentication (SCA), and produce cryptographic evidence of user consent, both important aspects of regulatory requirements such as the  Payment Services Directive (PSD2)  in Europe. Publication of Secure Payment Confirmation as a Candidate Recommendation indicates that the feature set is stable and has received wide review. W3C will seek additional implementation experience prior to advancing this version of Secure Payment Confirmation to Recommendation. Designed to meet growing demand for strong customer authentication For the past 15 years, e-commerce has increased as a percentage of all retail sales. The COVID pandemic appears to

Earlier this week, LinkedIn announced it was open-sourcing AvroTensorDataset, which is a “TensorFlow dataset for reading, parsing, and processing Avro data.” Apache Avro is the primary storage format that LinkedIn uses for its training data.  According to LinkedIn, it was experiencing bottlenecks in its machine learning workloads that were caused by the need to read multiple terabytes of input data. AvroTensorDataset can speed up preprocessing of data by multiple orders of magnitude, according to the company. The tool was built internally at LinkedIn, and it wanted to open-source the project so that others could experience the large performance boosts to training workloads. It has been in production for over a year already at LinkedIn.  LinkedIn says that with this tool it has been able to improve processing speed by 162x compared to existing solutions and has decreased overall training time by 66% “ATDSDataset is LinkedIn’s solution to efficiently read Avro data into TensorFlow. T

LambdaTest , a unified enterprise test execution cloud platform, has launched AI-powered command logs analytics in its  test intelligence platform . Customers can now intelligently analyze the test execution on the platform and gain insights into the error commands that are causing the test runs to fail. First, the ‘command status summary’ widget offers a summary of the response statuses for Selenium commands executed on the platform. This is visualized using a tree map, giving a quick and clear overview of the system’s status. Next up, the ‘command error trends’ widget provides a time-series representation of command log HTTP response statuses and groups tests with similar response statuses for a clear view of the system’s health and performance trends. Users can also use the ‘command error categorization’ widget to sort unique error messages from command logs, allowing users to identify common issues and prioritize bug fixes. Also, users can identify potential system bottlenecks an

Amazon Verified Permissions centralizes user permissions in a policy store, which developers can then use to authorize those users to perform certain actions in their applications.  According to Amazon, this felt like a necessary feature to create because of the significant effort required to implement authentication in an application. Typically, the logic for authorization happens within code, but it becomes increasingly complex as the number of users and permissions grows and changes.   For example, one user may need to share a document with someone in a different role, or a support agent might need to have temporary access to a customer account in order to help them resolve an issue.  “Managing permissions in code is prone to errors, and presents significant challenges when auditing permissions and deciding who has access to what, particularly when these permissions are expressed in different applications and using multiple programming languages,” Danilo Poccia, chief evangelist

It is no secret that our nation is facing a period of economic turmoil and it is wreaking havoc on the technology industry. However, despite this, companies must maintain their current product development cycles and levels of innovation. While keeping up the pace during these times can lead to near-term success, it often results in long-term consequences that companies must pay for down the line. One of those consequences is technical debt. The Growth of Technical Debt Over the last several months, technology companies have, unfortunately, needed to reduce their workforces and cut costs. This means that engineering teams must accomplish more with fewer resources. They still must bring their software and applications to market as quickly as possible and keep up with trends, market demands, and competition. To do so, engineering teams often must accrue technical debt. There are several activities that can result in the accumulation of technical debt, the most common being:  Impuls