News

Code.org Five Years On   Wednesday 28 February

It is 5 years since Code.org first proclaimed its message "Every student in school should have the opportunity to learn to code". Its Hour of Code event has seen exponential growth year on year and even more has been achieved in terms of changing the hearts and minds of educational policy makers and introducing Computer Science curriculum into schools not just in the USA but across the globe.

Google's Dart Reborn As Cross Platform App Language   Wednesday 28 February

If you, like many, thought Dart was dead as a JavaScript replacement, you might have to think again. The beta of Dart 2 is a surprise, but an even bigger surprise is Flutter - a Dart-based framework for building iOS and Android apps.

Apache Beam Moves To Java 8   Wednesday 28 February

Apache Beam, the open source programming SDK for defining batch and streaming data-parallel processing pipelines, is now available in a new version that moves to Java 8 and Spark 2.x.

Go Survey Revelations   Tuesday 27 February

Go programmers prefer Go to all other languages- well they would, wouldn't they! However there is much more of interest in this year's survey.

MariaDB 10.3 Release Candidate   Tuesday 27 February

The first release candidate of the next server version of MariaDB has been released. MariaDB Server 10.3.5 adds temporal data processing among other improvements.

I O T MicroMasters About To Start   Monday 26 February

A MicroMasters program focusing on the Internet of Things (I o T) on the edX platform starts on February 27th. To gain the credential, which comprises six courses, will take fourteen months and counts towards a Masters degree on-campus at Curtin University, Western Australia's largest university. 

Progressive Web Apps Do Seem To Be The Next Big Thing UPDATED   Monday 26 February

We know that we work in a field where fashion swings back and forth. The next big thing is what we all want to use, and it looks as if Progressive Web Apps are it.

Python Creator Is Computer History Museum 2018 Fellow   Monday 26 February

Guido van Rossum is one of the three honorees who become Fellows of the Computer History Museum this year. His award is for the creation and evolution of the Python programming language and for leadership of its community.

Robots! Fear Not!   Sunday 25 February

Boston Dynamics has a new video of SpotMini trying to open a door. I say trying because the twist in this case is that a human is trying to stop the door being opened. Open warfare between man and machine? Watch to see what happens.

OpenCat   Saturday 24 February

OpenCat is a project to build a robot cat and is an interesting project that demonstrates how much you can do with not a great deal.

Elon Musk Leaves OpenAI Over Conflict of Interest   Friday 23 February

Elon Musk has resigned from the board of OpenAI, the non-profit organization he co-founded in 2015. He will continue to donate to and advise the organization which co-authored  a major report on the threats posed by artificial intelligence, a topic on which Musk has forceful views.

Rust 1.24 Adds Reformatter   Friday 23 February

The latest version of Rust has added a tool to format its code in a standard style . The systems programming language also has incremental compilation enabled by default.

Top 5 Marketing Tools to Promote Your App   Thursday 22 February

For creating a successful application, it isn’t enough to merely code something useful and test it to make sure it works under a variety of conditions. You must also have a decent understanding of online marketing to get as many people as possible to download your app once it becomes available in the various app stores. 

Stimulus JavaScript Framework Released   Thursday 22 February

Stimulus, a new JavaScript Framework that revolves around just three main concepts: controllers, actions, and targets, was recently open-sourced by Basecamp and has now has reached Version 1.0.

Programming For Love or Money   Wednesday 21 February

Programming is a passion as well as a job. However there have to be limits on the amount of time devoted to it in order to preserve sanity. A  research study has looked into the extent to which programmers work outside office hours.

Professional Programmer

Advanced Java - Books Outside the Core   Monday 26 February

Java has a strong claim to being the most widespread programming language. Given its popularity, it's not surprising that our reviewers have scrutinized over 50 books relating to it, both new and classic. This is the pick of recommended titles for topics beyond core Java.

The Core

Chaining - Fluent Interfaces In JavaScript   Friday 23 February

One of jQuery's attractive features is the way that you can build up chains of commands that look almost like the way you would use a language. This is more generally called a "Fluent Interface" and it isn't difficult to implement in JavaScript.  An extra from Ian Elliot's forthcoming "JavaScript Jems: Patterns and Practice"