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Sencha Announces Release of Ext JS 7.4 at Annual SenchaCon Virtual Conference Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

Austin, Texas – Apr. 22, 2021  Sencha, a portfolio company of IDERA, Inc ., announced the release of 7.4 during its annual virtual developer conference, SenchaCon. Sencha’s Ext JS Web Application Development Platform empowers companies to seamlessly design, develop and test feature-rich, cross-platform web applications. Recent studies indicate that customers using Sencha’s award winning JS Grid outperformed alternative grids in multiple categories. SenchaCon 2021 was kicked off by Kegan Blumenthal, Sencha’s and Idera’s JS Brands General Manager. “We have been pleased by Sencha’s performance during a challenging year for all businesses.” said Blumenthal. “ We grew our business year over year and the increased participation at our annual conference by over 50% demonstrates that we are well positioned for future success.” Ext JS 7.4 continues Sencha ’s quest to build one of the best JS Grids in the industry by introducing multiple new features, including multi-level grouping, an advan

Report: DevOps teams need to foster a learning culture to thrive

A majority of DevOps teams believe that building a learning culture is highly important. According to the DevOps Institute’s Upskilling 2021 Report , 70% of respondents viewed it as a top priority.  In order to build a successful learning culture, teams have to eliminate blaming and shaming its members when problems arise. The report found some of the biggest challenges standing in the way of innovation include aversion to risk-taking and proposing new ideas, and habits of seeing past failures and success. It is crucial that problems are made visible so that others can learn from them and their solutions, the report explained. RELATED CONTENT: Four key metrics for measuring DevOps productivity DevOps Institute creates DevOps assessment model Respondents rated automation skills as the most important skill category, and human/soft skills as second most important. According to the survey, the human skills needed for DevOps are evolving. In addition to skills like collaboration,

Grafana Loki and Tempo switches to AGPLv3

Observability platform provider Grafana Labs announced its open-source projects Grafana, Grafana Loki and Grafana Tempo will now be available under the Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3). The projects were previously available under the Apache License 2.0.  Raj Dutt, CEO of Grafana Labs, explained it chose AGPLv3 because it is an Open Source Initiative approved license and meets the criteria of free and open-source software.  “Ensuring we maintain these freedoms for our community is a big priority for us. While AGPL doesn’t ‘protect’ us to the same degree as other licenses (such as the SSPL), we feel that it strikes the right balance. Being open source will always be at the core of who we are, and we believe that adopting AGPLv3 allows our community and users to by and large have the same freedoms that they have enjoyed since our inception,” he wrote in a post . The company also announced updates to its contributor license agreement (CLA) based on the CLA from the Apache Sof

Lightup launches beta program for its data quality monitoring solution

Data quality monitoring company Lightup has announced a beta program intended to help customers identify issues with their data.  Lightup tracks data that goes in and out of applications and detects when there are changes that would indicate data quality degradation. It takes metrics such as data availability, data delay, and data volume to determine this.  In addition, the solution works to learn the normal behavior of those metrics by analyzing past patterns and using it as a baseline. According to the company, its solution is designed to be used by data and analytics engineers who are building ETL or ELT pipelines. It is a pay-as-you-go solution, which means it doesn’t require a heavy upfront investment. It also includes a free option that companies can try before committing to using it.  It can be integrated with data warehouses like BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, and Redshift. “While it is well understood that data is the oxygen that fuels every application and process in

SD Times news digest: RedisConf 2021 news, Octopus’ new funding, and Perfecto Scriptless

Redis Labs announced that it is adding stronger consistency, integrated data models, low sub-millisecond latency for a globally deployed database and artificial intelligence to further Redis as a real-time data platform.  RedisRaft will be available in Redis 7.0 and will enable Redis to be deployed and run in a strongly consistent fashion, according to the company.  Additionally, the company announced new out-of-the-box integration of RedisJSON and RediSearch, enabling developers to natively store, index, query, and perform full-text search on documents that accelerate application modernization initiatives.  Additional details on all of the features in Redis Labs are available here . Octopus announces new funding Octopus Deploy, a deployment automation software company, announced that it closed a $172.5 million investment as the first venture funding the company accepted.  “In the last couple of years as our product has evolved, enterprises have become our fastest-growing segmen

Microsoft provides new details about Visual Studio 2022 release

Microsoft announced that the first public preview of Visual Studio 2022 will be released this summer. Visual Studio 2022 will be a 64-bit application and it’ll no longer be limited to ~4gb of memory in the main devenv.exe process. However, this won’t change the types or bitness of the applications developers can build with Visual Studio and they can still build 32-bit apps., the company explained.  “With a 64-bit Visual Studio on Windows, you can open, edit, run, and debug even the biggest and most complex solutions without running out of memory,” Amanda Silver, the CVP of product for the developer division at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post Visual Studio 2022 also introduces a refresh for the user interface to reduce crowding and to reduce the complexity and cognitive load. The changes include updated icons for better clarity, legibility and contrast, a new fixed-width font called Cascadia Code, improved product themes and an integration with Accessibility Insights.  In addition

Node.js 16 now available

Node.js 16 is now available with an upgrade to the V8 JavaScript engine, prebuilt binaries for Apple Silicon, and additional stable APIs.  The V8 JavaScript engine has been updated from version 8.6 to 9.0. According to the team, this update includes ECMAScript RegExp Match Indices, which provide start and end indices for a captured string. The team also created binaries for Apple Silicon, and this is the first Node.js release that will offer them. They were created with the help of the MacStadium project, the team explained. Node.js 16 also includes the Timers Promises API, which provides alternative timer functions that return Promise objects. This eliminates the need to use util.promisify(), the team added.  Features being deprecated in this release include removing access to process.binding() for several core modules.  Node.js 16 will replace Node.js 15 as the “Current” release line. It will be promoted to a Long-Term Support release in October 2021.  “A new major release i

SD Times news digest: Android GPU Compute changes, Xilinx’s Kria Portfolio, and ELISA Project expands its global ecosystem

The development team behind Android said that it no longer recommends RenderScript as the optimal way to run computationally-intensive code on the GPU or CPU without having to make use of the NDK or GPU-specific APIs and will deprecate the feature in Android 12.  Instead, developers will have access to an open-source library that contains highly-tuned CPU implementations for all Basic Linear Algebra Subprogram (BLAS) intrinsics. The library executes faster on the CPU when compared to RenderScript. Android recommends migrating RenderScript scripts to the cross-platform Vulkan API. Additional details are available here . Xilinx introduces Kria Portfolio The Kria SOM Portfolio contains adaptive system-on-modules for accelerating innovation and AI applications on the edge. Kria K26 SOM is built on top of the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC architecture, which features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, more than 250 thousand logic cells, and a H.264/265 video codec. Within the portfolio,

SD Times news digest: Google Play lets developers customize KPIs, Camunda’s productivity release, and Code Fellow teams up with CodeCrew

Developers can now customize and pin the precise metrics that matter to them in a personalized KPI section at the top of their Google Play Console application dashboard. Google provides an extensive list of available metrics including the new engagement and peer to peer comparisons that make it easy to find what developers want so they can select and edit dimensions and filters to suit exact needs.  In addition to suggested metrics, developers can also pin any other dashboard card to their KPIs.  “There are as many ways to customize your KPIs as there are people using the console. Instead of seeing default KPIs, now everyone can have a customized dashboard showing exactly the metrics that matter to their individual workflows,” Tom Grinsted, product manager for Google Play, wrote in a post . Camunda’s latest platform release Camunda announced a new productivity boosting feature that enables development teams to deliver critical process automation projects faster. New features incl

Survey: Spring users rate code high in quality, maintainability and test coverage

A recent Spring Framework User Survey of Java developers found that Spring/Spring Boot users rate their code higher in quality, maintainability and test coverage that non- Spring users. The survey of 450 Java developers also found that Spring users spend 25% of their time on tests, while non-Spring users spend 20% of their time on tests. Mathew Lodge, CEO of AI-powered automated test solution provider DiffBlue , which sponsored the survey, said the results are an example of how tooling can help organizations adopt a certain way of working. “Everyone talks about cultural change, and the culture of testing, and good tooling helps people do the right things,” he said. “Spring has really great support for unit testing and testing in general.” RELATED CONTENT: What’s in Java 16 Lodge noted that respondents said the primary benefit of Spring/Spring Boot is that it saves them time, but the second most important benefit to them is that the framework makes it easier for developer

Detect and Remove Loop in a Linked List Vijay Sinha The Crazy Programmer

In this article, we will look at an interesting problem related to Linked List . ‘Given a Single Linked List, Remove Loop if there exists any’ . We will look at different ways to solve this problem and analyze the complexities of our approach. Now, To Remove a Loop in a Linked List, we need to first Detect a Loop in the linked list. If a Loop exists we remove it with our logic and print the elements of the list. So having a Loop in a Linked List means there is no such node having a NULL pointer or reference. In simpler terms, the Linked list has no end. Let us understand this with an example. Here, we have a Linked List with 5 nodes, Node 12 is the Head node. We can see a Loop exists in the list connecting nodes 25 and 99 . So we need to Remove this Loop such that the last node (25) points to NULL. After removal the List should look like this: We can see the last node now points to NULL and the loop no longer exists. Now, let us look at different approaches to solve the proble

The battle for tech talent will require a plan (and a plan B)

After a year of pandemic-related job losses in the U.S., it might seem out of place to talk about the huge talent gap in our domestic tech industry. The reality is that the pandemic drove demand for digital customer experiences and products in an unprecedented way. In retail, for example, McKinsey reported that e-commerce skyrocketed to account for 33% of all retail sales in July 2020, far exceeding previous predictions that it would take until 2024 to achieve 24% of retail sales — a feverish pace that equated to more gains in 6 months than in the previous 10 years. As these digital trends stay with us, the talent gap will be exacerbated as competition for engineers, UX designers, and other tech workers are heightened. It’s important for companies of all sizes to have a multi-pronged talent strategy that reduces their risk but also enables them to be ambitious and realize their digital transformation agenda at the pace the world is now demanding. This means that talent considerations

IoXt extends security compliance program for mobile apps and VPNs

In an effort to standardize mobile security, 20 different companies in collaboration with the Internet of Security Things Alliance (ioXt) worked on adding a new set of security and privacy requirements for mobile apps and VPNs. Google, Amazon, NowSecure, NCC Group, DEKRA, Onware Security, and 7layers are among the companies who helped contribute to the new ioXt Mobile Application Profile standard.  The new requirements are an extension to the ioXt’s existing compliance program. They also build on standards set forth by the VPN Trust Initiative . According to Google, the ioXt Mobile Application Profile offers a security baseline that can help mitigate against common threats and reduce the likelihood of significant vulnerabilities. The ioXt believes this new standard will bring transparency and visibility to consumers and advance IoT security.   Mobile app testing provider NowSecure will be providing automatic scans of applications submitted through the Certification Portal. 

SD Times news digest: Docker Desktop available for Apple Silicon, GitHub Actions with GitHub CLI, and new Harness integrations

Docker Desktop is now supported for all devices using the Apple Silicon. Users can build and run images for both x86 and ARM architectures without having to set up a complex cross-compilation development environment. Docker Hub also makes it easy to identify and share repositories that provide multi-platform images.  Additional details are available here . GitHub Actions with GitHub CLI  GitHub Actions are now available in a developer’s terminal with GitHub CLI, giving users insight into their workflow runs and files from the comfort of their local terminal with two new top-level commands, ‘gh run’ and ‘gh workflow.’ With the new ‘gh run list,’ users also receive an overview of all types of workflow runs whether they were triggered via a push, pull request, webhook or manual event. ‘Gh run watch’ also helps users stay on top of in-progress workflow runs, which can be used to either follow along as a workflow run executes or combine it with other tools that send alerts when a ru

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Qiskit

Qiskit is an open-source framework for creating and running programs on quantum computers. The project was launched by IBM four years ago as an effort to introduce more programmers to quantum computing.  Since then, IBM has updated the SDK to better meet users’ needs and have provided pulse-level control to help programmers understand and work with qubits. Additionally, the company recently added the Qiskit Optimization model, which enables programmers to focus more on programs and less on how quantum systems work.  RELATED CONTENT: The climb to quantum supremacy IBM recently announced plans to evolve the Qiskit and provide a runtime environment that better reflects the developer community needs.  Plans include: Rearranging Qiskit’s original elements (Terra, Aer, Ignis and Aqua) into more-focused application models Migrating building blocks for algorithms into Qiskit’s core Replacing Aqua with Qiskit Nature, Finance, Optimization and Machine Learning modules Ignis to become