News

Does Strong Typing Help?   Wednesday 18 October

We all have our opinions on static strong typing versus dynamic or even no real typing at all, but hard evidence of what works is thin on the ground. Now some new research gives us some facts to throw into the debate.  

Google's Teachable Machine - What it really signifies   Wednesday 18 October

The Teachable Machine is an effort by Google to make Machine Learning and AI accessible to the wider public, without requiring any specialized training, knowledge in Computer Science or coding. 

Android Instant Apps Updates API   Wednesday 18 October

There's a new version of Google's Android Instant Apps SDK with configuration APKs to improve binary sizes, and a new API to keep user context when they move from an instant app to an installed app. 

Creator of cURL Awarded Prestigious Swedish Prize   Tuesday 17 October

Daniel Stenberg, himself a Swede, is the recipient of this year's Polhems Prize, consisting of a gold medal and 250,000 SEK (about $31,000 USD), for his creation of cURL, an open source program that is indispensable in today's interconnected world. 

PayPal Open Sources JavaScript Suite   Tuesday 17 October

The strength of PayPal's cross-domain JavaScript suite is that as the code has to run on a wide variety of third-party websites and other domains without causing problems, it is designed to avoid pitfalls.PayPal has just open sourced the whole suite. 

I Know Who You Are By The Way You Take A Corner   Tuesday 17 October

There are many things that reveal identity, but the way you drive around a corner doesn't seem that likely a candidate. However, it seems it can give you away. A sensor data from a single turn, preferably in a rural setting, seems to be enough. 

How Much Gameplay Can You Pack In Just 13K?   Monday 16 October

Given our expectations of Xbox games, you might consider writing a game within a 13K limit, which is the challenge for the annual js13K competition far too restrictive. Its results are now out and prove that it is possible to produce a game that is fun to play. 

Oracle Promises To Open Source Oracle JDK And Improve Java EE   Monday 16 October

Oracle has announced plans for Java SE and EE at JavaOne that will see improvements and changes to the licensing.  

AlphaGo The Movie - Who Is The Hero?   Saturday 14 October

A movie about a program that beats a human at a game? Probably not what you might expect, but AlphaGo is a movie about man versus machine and in this case the machine wins. 

Competitive Self-Play Trains AI Well   Saturday 14 October

OpenAI has some results which are interesting even if you are not an AI expert. Set AI agents to play against each other and they spontaneously invent tackling, ducking, faking and diving - just watch the video. 

Grow With Google   Friday 13 October

Sundar Pichai has announced that Google is distributing $1 billion to nonprofits in education and professional training. He also launched a new initiative, Grow with Google. 

Microsoft and Amazon Announce Gluon   Friday 13 October

Gluon, a new open source deep learning interface intended to allow developers to more easily and quickly build machine learning models  has been announced in a joint statement from Amazon and Microsoft.  

GitHub's Latest State Of The Octoverse   Thursday 12 October

GitHub is a phenomenal success as its latest annual report, The State of the Octoverse 2017, reveals. In 2017 the GitHub community reached 24 million developers affiliated to 1.5 million organisations working across 67 million repositories, 25 million of them public repositories and located in 200 countries of the world. 

MapR-DB Adds Native Secondary Indexes   Thursday 12 October

There's a new release of the MapR database, MapR-DB. Version 6 adds native secondary indexes and improved OJAI APIs.

The Core

JavaScript Async - The Fetch API   Monday 16 October

There are a number of new features in JavaScript that make good use of promises and hence async and await. The Fetch API is a replacement for the XMLHttpRequest function and perhaps the jQuery Ajax function. It also has a big role to play in the action of a ServiceWorker. If you are using modern JavaScript you probably should be using Fetch. This is an extract from Ian Elliot's soon-to-be-published book "JavaScript Async".

Getting Started with Node.js   Thursday 12 October

By bringing JavaScript to the server, Node.js is something of a buzz in the wider JavaScript world. Here we look at the problem it solves and how to make good use of it. This is an extract from I Programmer's forthcoming title "Programmer's Guide to Languages" covering languages that have featured on this site in the past couple of years.