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AWS has just announced that Amazon Q is now generally available. Amazon Q is a generative AI assistant designed for business use and it comes in two flavors: Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Q Business. The developer version can assist with tasks such as code generation, testing, debugging, while the business version can be used to answer questions from company data, such as policies, product information, business results, or employee data. According to AWS, only 30% of a developer’s time is spent actually coding, with most of the time spent doing things like learning from documentation or forums, managing infrastructure or resources, troubleshooting errors, refactoring code, and more.   “Since we announced the service at re:Invent, we have been amazed at the productivity gains developers and business users have seen. Early indications signal Amazon Q could help our customers’ employees become more than 80% more productive at their jobs; and with the new features we’re planning o

Azul , the only company 100% focused on Java, today announced that Azul Intelligence Cloud , Azul’s cloud analytics solution which provides actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data to dramatically boost developer productivity, now supports Oracle JDK and any OpenJDK-based JVM (Java Virtual Machine) from any vendor or distribution. Businesses are under pressure to accelerate application innovation cycles and optimize their development resources, while simultaneously ensuring the security of their applications and customer data. Azul’s Intelligence Cloud consists of two services which address these challenges for Java applications running in production: Azul Vulnerability Detection, to eliminate false positives by accurately identifying and prioritizing known security vulnerabilities; and Code Inventory, to help identify unused and dead code by precisely detailing what custom and third-party code is actually run. “We clearly see the benefit that Azul Intelligence C

GitHub has released a technical preview for a new Copilot-based platform designed to help out across all steps of the development life cycle, from planning to building to testing.  “Copilot Workspace represents a radically new way of building software with natural language, and is expressly designed to deliver–not replace–developer creativity, faster and easier than ever before. With Copilot Workspace we will empower more experienced developers to operate as systems thinkers, and materially lower the barrier of entry for who can build software,” GitHub wrote in a blog post .  GitHub Copilot Workspace leverages a task-centric experience for starting big projects, tackling feature requests, or resolving bug reports. It comes up with a step-by-step list of what tasks developers need to complete to achieve their goals. The process can be started from a GitHub repository or a GitHub Issue, and it creates the plan based on its understanding of the codebase, existing issue replies, and

OpenText is releasing a new solution, Open Source Select , designed to help developers find open source libraries that comply with their organization’s security policy.  Developers can search for open source libraries and will be shown only the results that they can actually use. According to OpenText, this helps cut down on the time spent looking for libraries, eliminates the guesswork of whether a particular library actually meets company policy, and reduces the need for back-and-forth approval processes.  By only allowing compliant libraries to be installed, OpenText is helping to address supply chain security issues before vulnerable components even have a chance to make it into the developer’s environment.  Open Source Select is available as a free browser extension and can work alongside existing software composition analysis tools.  “A major source of friction between developers, compliance teams and security teams is developer selection of open source libraries. With our l

Microsoft has announced that it is open sourcing MS-DOS 4.0 , in collaboration with IBM, who developed portions of the code. It will be available under the MIT license.  This came about because an English researcher, Connor “Starfrost” Hyde was exploring the relationship between DOS 4, MT-DOS (Multitasking DOS), and OS/2, and was in communication with Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer at Microsoft, about his collection. Starfrost found unreleased beta binaries of MS-DOS 4.0 on floppy disks in the collection, prompting him to reach out to the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office to see about the potential for releasing the full source code.  According to Microsoft, these floppies contained parts of MT-DOS, some of which can already be found on the internet, but it was determined that what they’d found here was a much earlier and unreleased version.  Scott Hanselman, vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division, and Jeff Sponaugle, an internet archivist, then imaged the disks a

Android dominates mobile devices with a 70.77% market share worldwide. This dominance is aided by its accessibility compared to Apple iOS. Given this massive market share, producing error-free applications is the most important. This is particularly true when it comes to integrating address verification. Precise location identification boosts user confidence, minimizes mistakes, and heightens business processes. This comprehensive guide explores address verification within the Android application creation. It aims to arm developers with insights and tactics vital for enhancing the end-user experience. By honing these competencies, developers can cultivate user devotion and increase engagement in the profitable domain of mobile applications. Overview of Address Verification API The address verification API offers a mechanism to process and verify a given address. This service breaks down the input address into its fundamental elements, checks the accuracy of each component, and en

Apple has released eight new small LLMs as part of CoreNet , which is the company’s library for training deep neural networks.  The models, called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), come in eight different options: four are pre trained models and four are instruction tuned and each comes in sizes of 270M, 250M, 1.1B, and 3B parameters. Because of the smaller model size, the models should be able to run directly on devices instead of having to connect back to a server to do calculations.  According to Apple, the goal of OpenELM is to “empower and enrich the open research community by providing access to state-of-the-art language models.”  The models are currently only available on Hugging Face and the source code was made available by Apple.  “The reproducibility and transparency of large language models are crucial for advancing open research, ensuring the trustworthiness of results, and enabling investigations into data and model biases, as well as potential ri

Most organizations understand the value of secrets management — which is the practice of securely storing development credentials like API keys, certificates, and SSH keys — but not all organizations are following secure secrets management practices. According to the secrets management provider Bitwarden ’s 2024 developer survey , which polled 600 developers across different industries, 86% of companies use a secrets management solution, leaving 14% who still don’t.  A 2023 Sophos report found that compromised credentials are the root cause of 50% of the attacks its incident response team studied.  And according to GitGuardian’s 2024 State of Secrets Sprawl Report , 12.7 million secrets were detected in public GitHub commits in 2023, which was a 28% increase from the previous year.  “Of course, that’s a massive issue for any organization who is trying to keep customer data secure. So it’s incredibly important for any developer to adhere to proper secrets management practices,”

The DevOps company Copado has announced a new AI assistant for Salesforce test creation called Test Copilot . This follows the company’s recent announcement of Copado Explorer , which is an automated testing solution designed for Salesforce users, as well as the launch of its AI assistant CopadoGPT , which Test Copilot is built on.  Users provide a text prompt of what needs to be tested and Test Copilot creates a test that fits those requirements. It can convert existing tests, Selenium tests, or Copado Explorer results into a new test, create tests from scratch, or turn recorded user sessions into test scripts.  “Copado is in the business of giving people their time back,” said Esko Hannula, senior vice president of product management at Copado. “By eliminating repeated tasks and using AI to automate the test creation process, Copado is helping release teams work faster than ever before while improving release quality. With our AI-powered testing solutions, Copado customers are

Quill is an open-source rich text WYSIWYG editor designed to be customizable by the user. It uses a modular architecture to allow the editor’s behavior and functionality to be changed. It officially supports a number of modules that can be added, including Toolbar, Keyboard, History, Clipboard, and Syntax. Each module also has additional configuration options as well for further customization.  The project offers cross-platform support, ensuring that things look the same regardless of what device or browser the developer is using.  “If some content produces a particular markup in Chrome on OSX, it will produce the same markup on IE. If hitting enter preserves bold format state in Firefox on Windows, it will be preserved on mobile Safari,” the docs claim .  Quill was developed by Jason Chen and Byron Milligan and is currently maintained by knowledge management platform Slab .  It currently has 41k stars on GitHub . The post SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Quill appe

Monster API today announces the world’s first GPT-based deployment agent ( MonsterGPT ) to simplify and speed up the process of fine-tuning and deployment of open source generative AI models, cutting implementation time from what could be take a full day down to 10 minutes, as well as significantly reducing engineering resources. With simple commands like “fine tune Llama 3,” developers can use the Monster API’s chat interface to fine tune and deploy the model without any need to deal with GPUs, ML environments, Kubernetes and much more.  To customize and run AI models, developers frequently face the challenge of adjusting and controlling as many as 30 variables. This involves not only mastering nuances of latest optimization frameworks for machine learning but also navigating the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, such as GPU cloud setups, containerization, and Kubernetes.  Should any of these variables not perform as expected, it may lead to the failure of the whole d

IBM has unveiled its intention to acquire HashiCorp in a huge $6.4 billion acquisition that is expected to close later this year.  IBM says that the goal with this acquisition is to create “a comprehensive end-to-end hybrid cloud platform.” HashiCorp’s portfolio includes a number of popular tools, including Terraform for infrastructure as code provisioning, Vault for secrets management, Consul for service-based networking, and more. According to a statement from HashiCorp , it will continue to operate under the HashiCorp name as a division within IBM Software. Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, said that by joining IBM, it will be able to offer its products to a much wider audience.  “While we are more than a decade into HashiCorp, we believe we are still in the early stages of cloud adoption. With IBM, we have the opportunity to help more customers get there faster, to accelerate our product innovation, and to continue to grow our practitioner community,” Dadgar

The API management company WSO2 has announced updates across several of its products: WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 API Platform for Kubernetes (WSO2 APK), and WSO2 Micro Integrator.  The WSO2 API Manager control plane was updated to now be able to manage both itself and WSO2 APK . This allows WSO2 APK APIs to benefit from the API Manager’s capabilities and the Developer Portal and Marketplace. According to the company, benefits include a more streamlined development process, a unified platform for building comprehensive API strategies, and the ability to deploy large numbers of APIs in a scalable way.  The control plane also gives both platforms access to the WSO2 AI Developer Assistant, providing new features like AI-based search functionality in the Developer Portal and AI-based API testing.  WSO2 APK also added support for the GraphQL query language to make it easier for developers to request data from their own services.  The company also introduced a VS Code extension for the

Datorios.com, a leading developer of real-time technology for Apache Flink announces today the immediate availability of the Datorios data observability platform for Apache Flink. The new offering gives organizations never-before-seen insights into streaming data processing, which makes it easier for companies to bring new real-time AI systems to market and audit their behavior. A flight data recorder for real-time AI Based on years of research and development in real-time military intelligence, Datorios provides never-before-seen insights into the streaming data that fuels AI applications and other realtime systems. Datorios reveals exactly how that data looks as it’s being transformed and processed within Apache Flink-based data pipelines, As a result, the development, troubleshooting, and auditing of real time AI applications becomes much easier. “The most innovative companies are trusting AI to put operations on auto-pilot,” said  Ronen Korman , CEO and co-founder of Datorios. “D

The database company Snowflake is adding another large language model (LLM) into the AI ecosystem. Snowflake Arctic is an LLM designed for complex enterprise workloads, with cost-effectiveness as a key highlight.  It can efficiently complete enterprise intelligence tasks like SQL generation, coding, and instruction following, meeting or exceeding benchmarks in those areas when compared to the models that had a much higher training budget than it needed. According to Snowflake, these metrics are important to businesses because those are the capabilities needed to build generative AI copilots.  Arctic is on par in terms of its enterprise intelligence with LLama 3 8B and Llama 2 70B, but used less than half of the training budgets as those models. It also was on par with Llama 3 70B, which had a training budget seventeen times higher. According to Snowflake, the low training cost will enable companies to train custom models without needing to spend excessive amounts of money.  “Build

New Relic is hoping to provide customers with a better understanding of the health and state of their AI applications with the introduction of New Relic AI monitoring . “New Relic AI monitoring brings the power of observability to engineers working on AI by providing the necessary insights to debug, monitor, and improve AI applications, ensuring that they operate as intended, deliver accurate results, and meet emerging standards for  responsible use,” New Relic wrote in a blog post back when the platform was first introduced into early access last November.  The new solution, which is now generally available, will enable customers to quickly determine the root cause of AI applications issues, enabling more efficient troubleshooting and resolution.  It provides a holistic view of AI applications and their infrastructure, tracking metrics like number of requests, response time, and token usage. From a single view, users can see trends in AI responses, analyze sentiment, and see use

Amazon has announced several major updates to Amazon Bedrock , its platform that provides developers with access to foundation models (FMs) from AI companies such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon.  Amazon Bedrock is a managed service, handling the underlying infrastructure for these models so that developers can build generative AI applications without worrying about managing that.  The company added a new Custom Model Import option, which allows developers to add their own proprietary models to Amazon Bedrock. This allows them to leverage domain-specific models that were trained on their own data.  Companies can create their models in Amazon SageMaker or another tool and then import them into Amazon Bedrock. Imported models go through an automated validation process to ensure that they meet proper safeguards and responsible AI standards. It currently supports three open model architectures — Flan-T5, Llama, and Mistral — and more will be

The testing company mabl has announced that it now offers automated mobile testing capabilities in its platform, which already offered testing for web and APIs.  It was designed to give full coverage of all the unique functionalities of varying mobile devices and their operating systems. With this new new offering, tests are created through a low-code interface, meaning that developers can create tests for their mobile apps in a matter of minutes and non-developers can also utilize the platform. According to the company, this makes testing more accessible and will help to build a culture of quality throughout the organization. Tests can be executed in parallel across multiple devices, ensuring that testing teams are able to get results faster.   The platform also offers capabilities designed to increase trust in test results by minimizing the occurrence of flaky tests, which are tests that return both passing and failing results. These include things like auto-healing , which is w

Over half of organizations feel that their cybersecurity and cloud skills are lacking, according to the 2024 Technical Skills Report by Pluralsight, a company that provides upskilling resources. For this year’s report, the company surveyed 1,400 executives and IT professionals. Sixty-five percent of the respondents said that their company was lacking cybersecurity skills and 52% said they were lacking cloud skills. Software development followed closely behind with 40% saying their organizations had a skills gap in that area. The consequences of having a skills gap include increased workloads (experiences by 96% of respondents) and challenges adopting new technology (57%), maintaining legacy systems (53%), keeping business opportunities (44%), and retaining clients (33%).  Sixty-three percent say that cybersecurity skills will be important to learn in the next year, 47% said cloud, and 45% said software development. RELATED CONTENT: Staying relevant in tech requires continual lea

SmartBear has announced that its API development platform SwaggerHub has been integrated with Stoplight , an API design company that SmartBear acquired last summer .    According to the company, Stoplight helps simplify the API development process by providing an intuitive interface for design. This makes API design accessible to non-technical users and streamlines the process for technical users. “SmartBear’s mission is to empower customers with the solutions and capabilities they need to drive quality and efficiency across development teams,” said Sean Butler, vice president of product management at SmartBear. “Integrating Stoplight’s advanced API design features into SwaggerHub highlights this commitment to enhance the API development lifecycle, particularly critical now with the onslaught of AI-related APIs. Customers can expect multiple benefits, including a seamless developer experience from API design to deployment,” said Sean Butler, vice president of product management at S

GitLab has announced that its AI assistant GitLab Duo Chat is now generally available as part of the GitLab 16.11 release.  GitLab Duo Chat can answer questions about issues, epics, code, errors, CI/CD configurations, or the GitLab platform itself. It can also refactor existing code and generate tests. For instance, a developer onboarding onto a project could ask for general knowledge like understanding the CI/CD setup, learning the difference between an issue and an epic, resetting their GitLab password, and getting started with specific development frameworks.  “With Chat, you have an assistant ready to answer all of your onboarding questions, and soon you’re ready to dig into your first project,” GitLab wrote in a blog post .  Organizations can control which data the AI gets read access to at the project, sub-group, and group levels. GitLab also said that customer data isn’t used to train its AI models.  GitLab Duo Chat is available within GitLab and in popular IDEs like VS Co

Meta has revealed the next generation of Llama, which is an open-source large language model (LLM) family developed by the company. The Llama 3 models are considered by Meta to be “the best open source models of their class, period,” the company claimed in a blog post .  It has released the first two models in the Llama 3 family, one with 8B parameters and one with 70B. The company says these models are significantly better than the Llama 2 models, offering much lower false refusal rates, improved alignment, and more diversity in model responses. Specific model capabilities like reasoning, code generation, and instruction following were also greatly improved, according to Meta. Llama 3 was pre-trained on more than 15T tokens from publicly available sources, making the Llama 3 training set seven times bigger than Llama 2’s training dataset, with four times more code as well.  According to Meta, when developing Llama 3, it also developed a new human evaluation set for benchmarking,

STORM is an open-source project that can research and develop a full report of a topic, complete with sources. It originated from a paper out of Stanford.  According to the Stanford researchers, there is a disconnect online between “the vast amounts of accessible information and what an individual can realistically assimilate.” They explained that while generative AI models can generate information, they actually contribute more to the problem by creating even more information to parse through.  “This research project explores building a knowledge curation agent that can proactively research a topic, organize the information, and present the most pertinent insights in a reader-friendly way. Hopefully, STORM can provide a good starting point for knowledge discovery and liberate in-depth learning from the laborious search process,” the Stanford website states .  It breaks down the report generation process into two stages: pre-writing and writing. In the pre-writing stage, STORM gath

Red Hat is expanding its Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain solution with new offerings that will enable customers to ensure software components are verified and secured.  The first new addition is Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer, now generally available, which allows developers to cryptographically sign and verify application artifacts with a keyless certificate authority.  According to Red Hat, the benefit of this new offering is that it enables organizations to be more confident about the integrity of software without having to manage a centralized key management system.  Next, the company announced Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, also now generally available, which provides a single source of truth for documentation like Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and Vulnerability Exploitability Exchange (VEX). And finally, Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline, now in beta, incorporates supply chain security capabilities into software templates that developers use. The company e

The testing company Tricentis has just announced the first in a series of AI copilots for its testing portfolio. The first solution is Testim Copilot, which adds AI capabilities to the automated testing platform Testim .  With Testim Copilot, users can input a text description of what they want to test and receive the JavaScript code for that test. In addition to providing test code, it also provides an explanation of that code, which makes it easier to understand and potentially reuse that code for future tests. By incorporating generative AI into the testing process, Tricentis hopes to make testing accessible to testers with not as much technical knowledge. For users of all experience levels it has the potential to save time and reduce errors. According to Tricentis, customers who have already been using its AI tools have lowered their test failure rate by 16%.  “Testim Copilot puts AI directly into the hands of the user, automatically suggesting test cases and fixes, meaning mo

Last week, California Representative Adam Schiff introduced new legislation that would require companies to be more upfront and transparent with consumers when they train generative AI models using copyrighted work. The Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act would make it so that companies need to submit a notice to the Register of Copyrights before they release an AI system that was trained on copyrighted works. This would also retroactively apply to models previously released that fit the requirements. “AI has the disruptive potential of changing our economy, our political system, and our day-to-day lives. We must balance the immense potential of AI with the crucial need for ethical guidelines and protections. My Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act is a pivotal step in this direction. It champions innovation while safeguarding the rights and contributions of creators, ensuring they are aware when their work contributes to AI training datasets. This is about respecting creati