Featured Articles

JavaScript Canvas Stroke Properties
Ian Elliot

The stroke function simply colors the outline of the path. This all sounds easy and obvious, but in practice it is subtle and you need to understand it to get control of what exactly is happening. In this extract from a chapter in my new book on JavaScript Graphics we look at some of the fine detail of stroke.

Working with classes and objects is a very sophisticated approach to programming. You can't expect to absorb all of its implications in one go. We have already looked at the basics of class and objects. Now we need to look at encapsulation, constructors, overloading and inheritance. 

News

The True State of Java and its Ecosystem
12 Feb | Nikos Vaggalis

JRebel has released its 2020 Java Technology Report. Combining its findings with those of  two other recent reports on Java, from Baeldung and Snyk, allows us to reveal the latest state of affairs regarding Java and its ecosystem. 

To date Google has paid $80 billion to Android developers. Apple, however, has paid out $155 billion to devs, almost twice as much. What does this discrepancy mean? 

The winners of Google Code-in 2019 have been announced. The Grand Prize winners, who represent 21 countries, will get to enjoy a 4-day trip to Google HQ to meet with mentors from the open source projects they work on and with Google engineers.

Swift 5.2 is now available in a beta version with improvements including smaller code size and more efficient memory use, alongside better error diagnostics.

HackerRank has published the results of its third annual survey which collected data and opinions from more than 160,000 developers from 162.countries.  In our second look at its findings, we focus on variations in pay and developers satisfaction with their pay.  

Angular 9 has been released with improvements to the framework, Angular Material, and the CLI. This release also moves over to the Ivy compiler and runtime by default, and introduces improved ways of testing components. 

It's easy to welcome the rise of voice-assisted smart technology for its convenience. But what about the problems? Being called Alexa today results in being bullied and home control devices are being used for domestic abuse.

Cells are the building blocks of animals so why not repurpose them to create machines that do predetermined jobs? That's what a team at the University of Vermont has done to create xenobots.

A new tool that can help find Microsoft Knowledge Base articles that have been deleted from the Microsoft site has been launched. The Microsoft KB Archive Search is described by its creators as a targeted Wayback time machine. 

At the end of last year Electron joined the OpenJS Foundation as an incubator project. The release of Electron 8, less than two months later, is an indication that it is thriving in its new home. 

While a quarter of Java developers and running the most recent Long Term Support version Java 11 in production, almost two thirds still use Java 8 and only 4% have adopted Java 12.

KDevelop 5.5 has improved support for C++, PHP and initial support for Python 3.8. KDevelop is a free IDE for the KDE platform on Unix and Linux. It focuses on support for C++, Python, PHP and JavaScript/QML, using external compilers such as Clang and GCC rather than having its own compiler.

Books of the Week

Full Review

Visual Basic In Easy Steps, 6th Ed

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Lucy Black begins her review with:

This is a colorful short book. This makes it very suitable as an introduction for the complete beginner.

Added to Book Watch

Programming in Scala 4th Ed (Artima Press)

Black Hat Go (No Starch Press)