Featured Articles

The Programmers Guide To Kotlin - Collections
Mike James

Kotlin has all of Java's collections and some. In this extract from the book on Kotlin by Mike James, we look at and its approach to collections and how to work with them.

John Conway's Life isn't just a fascinating program, it's an example of a cellular automaton. The theory of cellular automata (CA) sounds intimidating, but in fact it's simple and fun. It is a deep mystery how complex things arise from simple things – almost without even seeming to try. And how best to implement it? 

News

Code Borrowing and Licence Violations
26 Feb | Sue Gee

A study of the re-use of code from over twenty thousand Java projects on GitHub discovered that almost 30% of them might be involved in potential code borrowing and almost 10% of them could potentially violate original licenses.

The Free Software Foundation intends to launch a "fully free" public code hosting and collaboration platform this year. Rather than creating a new forge, it is going to adapt an existing one with Fedora Pagure currently the front runner.

Java Development Kit (JDK) 14 is now at the release candidate stage and the feature set for the March 2020 release has been frozen. Highlights of the new version will include extra pattern matching, better handling of switch expressions, and an API for the JDK Flight Recorder.

LinQer is a library that sprang out of the need to fix two problems of Javascript's built-in iteration methods. It brings .NET's LINQ approach to databases to JavaScript.

Gretel, which will enable developers to work collaboratively with data, comes from a team made up of engineers and developers who previously worked for the National Security Agency, Google and Amazon Web Services.

In this third and last part of the saga examining Java's ecosystem in which we try to decipher its direction, we look at  Build tools, the popularity of other languages on the JVM and conclude with career tips for all aspiring Java rock-star developers!

The success of autonomous vehicles relies on them being safe and trustworthy. Security researchers have revealed how easy it is to fool self-driving Teslas by sticking tape on a speed limit sign and projecting a hologram of an Elon Musk lookalike on the roadway.

A new IoT Assistant app has been designed to inform you about what Internet-connected smart devices are around you at any point in time and what kind of information they might be collecting. The app is also intended to let people opt out of having their data collected when this option is available.

With the Supreme Court hearing of Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc set for March 24th, Oracle's supporters have now filed their legal briefs. The pro-Oracle submissions includes one from the United States Government filed on the same day as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison hosted a re-election campaign fundraiser.

Google has announced GameSnacks, an experimental project designed to create games that load and run on low memory devices and slower mobile networks.

CheerpJ is a Java-to-Javascript runtime and compiler that can convert any Java application to HTML5 for in-browser rendering. CheerpJ 2.0, which features WebAssembly support, was released earlier this month.

DeepCode has launched an AI-powered code review plugin for Atom. The Atom version joins existing plugins for Visual Studio Code and GitHub.

Books of the Week

Full Review

• WordPress In Easy Steps, 2nd Ed
  Rating: 3 (out of 5)
  Kay Ewbank concluded her review of a book for non-programmers with:

If you're thinking of recommending this book to avoid having to be a free consultant to someone starting out with a website or blog, it might help a bit, but you're still going to have to explain a lot.

Added to Book Watch

• Modern Systems Programming with Scala Native (Pragmatic Programmer)
• Introduction to Static Analysis (MIT Press)
• gRPC: Up and Running (O'Reilly)