News

The Job's Not Done Until Edge Don't Run  
Wednesday 19 December

In a recent news item we speculated on why Microsoft gave up on its own rendering engine and decided to adopt Chromium. Now we might have another clue as to why it happened. 

MariaDB Adds Node.js Connector  
Tuesday 18 December

The developers of MariaDB have released a connector for Node.js for the database, giving developers a way to build build Node.js applications on top of MariaDB’s relational database. 

Git Improves Usability  
Tuesday 18 December

Git 2.20 has been released with improvements to cloning, fetching, and grepping, all designed to improve usability and performance. 

Eliminating Swear Words From OpenJDK  
Tuesday 18 December

Last week concern was raised over "too many swear words" in  the source code for OpenJDK. Within three days the issue was resolved after a courteous exchange of views. 

TigerGraph Releases Cloud Version  
Monday 17 December

TigerGraph has released a cloud version of its graph database. TigerGraph Cloud supports AI and machine learning applications, and was announced at the annual Amazon Web Services Re:Invent conference. 

Liquid Computers   Sunday 16 December

Yes, it's not a misprint. In these days of solid state computers, and perhaps even one day quantum computers, it seems strange that you can use liquids to do the same jobs - and more. 

Vector Plus Alexa - A Useful Combo 
Saturday 15 December

Launched a couple of months ago, Anki's Vector Robot is a voice-activated desktop robot that can answer questions, show you the weather, provide a countdown timer, take photos for you and more. It now comes with Amazon Alexa built-in, greatly expanding its range of behaviors and its usefulness.   

The Benefits of A Udacity Nanodegree  
Friday 14 December

Udacity has passed another milestone - its 50,000th Nanodegree program graduate. Udacity also revealed that  gaining a nanodegree leads to an average salary increase around the globe and 33% more in the US and Canada.  

Instaclustr Releases Cassandra Tools  
Friday 14 December

Three open source projects for use with Apache Cassandra have been released by Instaclustr. The projects are designed to make it easier to work with Cassandra alongside Kubernetes, LDAP and Kerberos. 

Rust 2018 Released To Improve Developer Productivity   Friday 14 December

Rust 2018 has now been released. This is the first major release since Rust 1.0 in 2015, and alongside new language features, it includes IDE support, updated libraries, new documentation, domain working groups, and a new website. 

3D JavaScript Library Improves Renderers  
Thursday 13 December

An updated version of Three.js has been released with improvements to its rendering facilities for Canvas 2D, SVG, CSS3D, and WebGL. 

Professional Programmer

Tools Doth A Language Make  
Thursday 13 December

Languages are not islands that can be considered in isolation. They have to be part of a development environment and it is time that this was fully recognized. A language isn't just syntax and semantics. A language is syntax, semantics and an IDE.  

The Core

The Programmers Guide To Kotlin - Delegated Properties   Monday 17 December

Properties are fundamental to objects and languages differ in how sophisticated they are. Kotlin has a very sophisticated property infrastructure including delegated properties where another object is used to provide properties to a range of other classes.