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The latest version of the JavaScript runtime Node.js is now available.  Node.js 18 includes an update to the V8 JavaScript engine, global fetch enabled by default, and a core test runner module. The V8 engine has been upgraded to version 10.1. This latest version is part of Chromium 101. Upgrading to this latest version unlocked features like the findLast and findLastIndex array methods, improvements to the Intl.Locale API, the Intl.supportedValuesOf functions, and improved performance of class fields and private class methods.  The implementation for global fetch is based on undici-fetch. The team is working to make the implementation as close to spec compliant as possible, but since it requires things not present in backend networking, certain aspects of the spec were omitted. Currently the global fetch API is experimental and will remain so until more test coverage can be added.  “Node.js 18 will enable the Fetch API as a default. It’s been available since Node.js 17, but this mo

A new platform called Slingshot is launching today to give companies a single platform for collaborating on data analytics, projects, content, and chat.  Slingshot was built by the Infragistics Innovation Lab. It is available as a desktop app, mobile app, or can be accessed via any web browser.  According to Infragistics, as companies scrambled to adapt to distributed working environments, they have adopted a number of tools but most have ended up with more than they needed and workers are having to constantly switch between several apps. Slingshot aims to bring everything together in one place so that this switching isn’t needed. It includes native chat functionality, content-sharing, and a data catalog.  Teams can connect Slingshot to multiple data sources, such as databases and spreadsheets, SaaS systems, and Big Data and cloud data products. It also integrates with financial, marketing and sales tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, Marketo, and Google Console, as wel

Since Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine, 53% of Ukrainian citizens have lost their jobs and over 4.5 million have been forced to flee the country, according to CodeGym, the Ukrainian online course for learning Java programming. Because of this, CodeGym announced the launch of a special donation program to help Ukrainians that have been severely impacted by the war.  The company is matching every purchase of monthly and yearly subscriptions with two donations to Ukrainian residents in order to help those who are suffering start a new career in IT.  For a limited time, CodeGym can offer 5,000 unemployed Ukrainians free access to the company’s Java educational platform to help them get back on their feet and start fresh with a new career.  Current CodeGym users also have the ability to extend their subscription through the donation program in order to provide the same limited time subscription to two Ukrainians in need.  The donated subscriptions will be given to those who are inter

With the release of TIBCO WebFOCUS 9.0.0, the company announced stronger data access, AI/ML capabilities, and developer tools. “Valuable data and AI/ML algorithms flow through absolutely every corner of an organization. The use of visual discovery and improved data management enables users and developers to turn that raw data into truly meaningful insights,” said Mark Palmer, the senior vice president of engineering at TIBCO. “This game-changing release of TIBCO WebFOCUS supports a containerized, cloud-native deployment, which includes dynamic auto-scaling to drive overall infrastructure and cloud costs down, allowing customers to pay only for what they use.” One new feature, TIBCO WebFOCUS Container Edition provides users with a scalable, microservices-based platform for container-based deployments. It offers on-demand compute and parallel processing with which customers can scale their environments and run multiple tasks concurrently.  Also with the addition of Hub, users can acce

CloudBees , the software delivery platform for enterprises, today launched CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition .  With this, development teams gain access to enterprise-grade feature flagging capabilities, advancing the technique of progressive delivery within modern software engineering. This release allows teams of up to 15 developers to take advantage of feature flags at scale, working to tackle common challenges such as technical debt and governance issues.  CloudBees Feature Management Community Edition brings users several features, such as flag approvals, flag lifecycling, a real proxy, webhooks, audit logs, flag scheduling, and full access to all of the software development kits available from CloudBees. Additionally, this extension offers 250,000 client-side monthly active users and 100 million impressions per month.  The Community Edition also integrates with Jenkins and the CloudBees platform to achieve greater visibility of feature flags across continuous i

Software AG today announced that it has closed the acquisition of StreamSets, following regulatory approval. The original terms of the agreement remain unchanged. Software AG has now added a fast-growing SaaS and subscription business and enterprise-grade data integration platform. This combination enables organizations to better unlock and capture value from data as it moves between on-premise applications, data streams, SaaS applications, legacy data stores and cloud data platforms like Amazon RedShift, Databricks and Snowflake. The combined hybrid iPaaS platform will deliver consolidated, conformed, continuous data to smart applications and the connected enterprise. Sanjay Brahmawar, Software AG CEO, commented: “We are delighted to see this deal close and begin the exciting journey ahead of us. We see tremendous opportunity to aggressively expand our position in the market by helping our customers solve bigger and more mission critical challenges than ever before. This acquisitio

Netlify today announced the release of Netlify Edge Functions in order to bring standards-based edge compute to the company’s development workflow. With this, developers are enabled to build fast web experiences in less time, according to Netlify.  Netlify Edge Functions runs dynamic content or an entire application from the network edge without the need to compromise performance, the company said in a statement announcing the release. “Front-end and web frameworks are starting to take advantage of a programmable, streaming edge layer, and it’s an enormous opportunity,” said Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify. “As this starts to open new possibilities within the Jamstack architecture, it’s essential that we follow a similar transparent, standards-based approach with our serverless runtime at Netlify’s Edge network. This way developers can use these newer edge-first capabilities in today’s frameworks without even having to think about the underlying infrastructure.” Built on the open-sour

LinkedIn has announced that the most used, core aspects of Feathr, its feature store for productive machine learning (ML), are being open sourced.  Feathr works to address the problem of overburdening teams with the increasing costs of maintaining their feature preparation pipelines.  Feathr works as an abstraction layer that provides users with a common feature namespace for defining features and a common platform for computing, serving, and addressing them “by name” from within ML workflows.  Feathr also brings advanced support for feature transformations which enables users to experiment with new features based on raw data sets.  Additionally, Feathr’s abstraction creates producer and consumer personas for features. Both roles can be played by the same engineer, producing and consuming features for their own project. Feathr users have reported a reduction in the time required to add new features to model training workflows as well as an improved runtime performance. According

Even before the Log4j vulnerability led to the targeting of nearly one-half of global corporate networks, Java applications have presented abundant opportunities for hackers. After all, there are so many components to protect – server-side logic, client-side logic, data storage, data transportation, APIs and others – that it’s daunting to defend everything. In fact, serious vulnerabilities exist within 44 percent of Java apps , compared to 23 percent in .NET ones. Fortunately, most vulnerabilities share the same root causes. But before you can fix them, you have to find them. And to find them, you have to know what you’re looking for. With this in mind, here’s our list of the top seven Java security pitfalls – and what you should do about them: XXE attacks. This happens when cyber adversaries exploit an extensible markup language (XML) parser to read arbitrary files on your server. They can then deploy an XML external entity (XXE) to retrieve user information, configuration files o

GitHub announced a new feature for Dependabot alerts that helps developers see how vulnerabilities affect their code. Dependabot alerts use GitHub’s precise code navigation engine to determine if a repository directly calls a vulnerable function.  The new feature marks a shift in how GitHub curates information on vulnerable packages from the Advisory Database to curating information on affected functions for each source library.  GitHub performs static analysis with functions in order to generate an affected call graph for a repository, which surfaces on a Dependabot alert.  The implementation is powered by stack graphs, which powers Precise Code Navigation and provides a no-configuration experience that works on any advisories with annotated vulnerable functions, according to GitHub. GitHub announced that it has details of vulnerable functions for 79 Python advisories from the pip ecosystem and that it will continue backfilling data on vulnerable functions for Python advisories t

The analytics engineering company, dbt Labs , has announced that dbt Cloud is now available on Databricks Partner Connect . This brings users a risk-free, fast, and frictionless method to experience dbt Cloud on the lakehouse. Through this integration, Databricks users will be able to quickly provision a new dbt Cloud trial that is already pre-connected to their Databricks account.  According to dbt Labs, this is helpful for customers who are looking to quickly get a feel for what dbt Labs and Databricks can achieve together through a streamlined and pre-configured workflow.  “The dbt Community has long had interest in a joint solution with Databricks, and thanks to this accelerating partnership, we’re now able to deliver a turnkey experience to Databricks customers looking to experience dbt Cloud,” said Margaret Francis , chief product officer at dbt Labs. “It’s a natural fit – with dbt as the transformation framework running on top of a unified lakehouse, data teams have access

Facebook announced that it open-sourced Lexical, an extensible JavaScript web text-editor library that emphasizes reliability, accessibility and performance. The project’s set of editor states represent the current and pending states of the editor at any given time. Developers can attach a content-editable DOM element to editor instances, and also register listeners and commands. Users can create an editor instance with the createEditor() API. Lexical’s states contain two parts: a Lexical node tree and a Lexical selection object which are immutable once created.  Lexical has its own DOM reconciler that takes a set of Editor States (always the “current” and the “pending”) and applies a “diff” on them. It then uses this diff to update only the parts of the DOM that need changing.  Lexical is compatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies and it is framework agnostic and provides a set of bindings for React to simplify building custom functionality. Additional detail

The team at JetBrains has announced the first major release of the year for its Java IDE IntelliJ. With IntelliJ IDEA 2022.1, customers gain multiple enhancements and new features all geared at improving user experience.  This release introduces the Dependency Analyzer that works to facilitate dependency management and conflict resolution. Another update is the Notifications tool window, which brings users a new way to receive and store notifications from the IDE.  Additionally, the updated New Project wizard works to simplify the process of launching new projects no matter the scale or level of complexity.  IntelliJ IDEA 2022.1 also brings users upgrades to Code Vision inlay hints with Code Author hints as well as enables them all by default to offer users instant insights about their code directly in the editor.  Support has also been added for the new features in Java 18 and improvements have been brought to the IDE’s performance with Kotlin. Another highlight of this release i

Recently, Microsoft announced that the third preview of .NET 7 is now available. This release brings users enhancements to observability, startup times, codegen, GC regions, Native AOT compilation, and more.  Interested users can download .NET 7 Preview 3 for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It has also been tested with Visual Studio 17.2 Preview 3. Microsoft recommends using the preview channel builds to try .NET 7 with Visual Studio family products. With Native AOT, pre-compilation is brought to .NET desktop client and server scenarios. According to Microsoft, this addition does not serve to replace existing technology, but rather to offer a new set of capabilities that allows users access to new form factors.  This preview release also adds support for new cloud native OpenTelemetry specifications. This includes specification updates #988 and #1708 that make the trace state mutable for samplers.  With this, the latest Managed Extensibility Framework also received a slight upda

Testing company Applitools has announced the release of Native Mobile Grid , which is an AI-powered mobile testing solution. It allows for automated testing of both iOS and Android apps.  According to Applitools, mobile applications have been historically difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to test. Part of this is because mobile devices can be expensive to own and maintain. Now teams can run mobile tests on a local environment and then Native Mobile Grid will validate the UI/UX of the application across other devices.  When Native Mobile Grid was in early access, it outperformed both in-house device farms and real-device clouds, the company said. Tests done with Native Mobile Grid were being completed in under two minutes, whereas with other methods it would take eight to 10 minutes.  Native Mobile Grid also works out of the box with several mobile test and UI frameworks.  Other key features include AI-driven baseline testing, locator tracking, root cause analysis, localizat