Java SE 8 will see its General Availability release next Monday, March 18. Although Project Jigsaw won’t make the cut, the release is notable for adding support for lambda expressions and virtual extension methods.

Enhance your SQL Server performance by following the SQL Server Storage Best Practices advice in this month’s SQL Server Pro.

Continuing on its four-monthly release train, the Eclipse team has  released Orion 5.0 with a new look and feel and a new navigation bar.

Google Summer Of Code 2014 is its tenth consecutive year of matching up students who want real world coding experience with open source organizations who can make use of their enthusiasm. To mark this milestone 10% more students will be accepted into the program this year.

JavaScript continues its relentless advance on other hapless languages. Now we have Node.js running under the JVM which more or less universal - well as universal as Java. 

A recent contest challenged devs to come up with a program to create an image that contains all the RGB colors exactly once. It produced some stunning results and the winner, by popular vote, was Jozsef Fejes with his Rainbow Smoke image.

Today is International Woman's Day. Google has a doodle to celebrate it and the Anita Borg Institute has an infographic about  notable women in computing.

Feeling overwhelmed and confused by the sheer volume of news? If you need to know what's important for the developer, you can rely on  I Programmer to sift through all the news, uncover the most relevant stories and deliver the highlights each week.

Apache Hadoop 2.3.0 has been released with support for in-memory caching and heterogeneous storage hierarchy for HDFS.

It's getting ever easier to bring Microsoft and Android together. Now we have news of the Office 365 SDK for Android, an open source project that helps Android developers access Office 365 data from their apps.

JPEG is well known, well used and well understood. Surely there cannot be anything left to squeeze out of this old compression algorithm? Mozilla seems to think that we can get more if we are careful.

The good news is that despite the rumors that there would be no next version of DirectX, and despite Microsoft not being quick to reassure people of the future of DirectX, it seems that version 12 will be outlined at GDC later in the month.

Conway's game of Life is huge among programmers and mathematicians alike. It has generated a community of "Lifers" dedicated to constructing whole worlds in Life and investigating it as if it was a universe of its own. And yet, in this new video, John Conway, its inventor admits to hating it....

Microsoft has extended the early adoption period during which Visual Studio Online developers can make use of the service for free.

In our regular monthly round up of Computer Science MOOCs we have options that will be of interest if you want to undertake a course of study rather than a one-off course.

What a waste of effort bitcoin mining is -all that computer time just to validate transactions! Riecoin is a new crypto currency that uses a search for prime constellations as its proof of work.