Tech News - Application Development

Yesterday, the team at Gitlab released GitLab 11.7, an application for the DevOps lifecycle that helps the developer teams work together efficiently to secure their code. GitLab 11.7 comes with features like multi-level child epics, API integration with Kubernetes, cross-project pipeline and more. What’s new in GitLab 11.7 Managing releases with GitLab 11.7 This version of GitLab eliminates the need for manual collection of source code, build output, or metadata associated with a released version of the source code. GitLab 11.7 comes with releases in GitLab Core which helps users to have release snapshots that include the source code and related artifacts. Multi-level child epics for work breakdown structures This release comes with multi-level child epics in GitLab portfolio management which allow users to create multi-level work breakdown structures. It also helps in managing complex projects and work plans. This structure builds a direct connection between planning and actionable issues. Users can now have an epic containing both issues and epics. Streamlining JavaScript development with NPM registries This release also delivers NPM registries in GitLab Premium that provides a standard and secure way to share and version control NPM packages across projects. Users can then share a package-naming convention for utilizing libraries in any Node.js project and NPM. Remediating vulnerabilities GitLab 11.7 helps users to remediate vulnerabilities in the apps and suggest a solution for Node.js projects managed with Yarn. Users can download a patch file, and apply it to their repo using the git apply command. They can then push changes back to their repository and the security dashboard will then confirm if the vulnerability is gone. This process is easy and reduces the time required to deploy a solution. API integration with Kubernetes This release comes with API support to Kubernetes integration. All the actions that are available in the GUI currently, such as listing, adding, and deleting a Kubernetes cluster are now accessible with the help of the API. Developers can use this feature to fold in cluster creation as part of their workflow. Cross-project pipeline With this release, it is now possible to expand upstream or downstream cross-project pipelines from the pipeline view. Users can view the pipelines across projects. Search filter box for issue board navigation This release comes with a search filter that makes navigation much easier. Users can simply type a few characters in the search filter box to narrow down to the issue board they are interested in. Project list redesign Project list UI is redesigned in GitLab 11.7 and mainly focuses on readability and summary of the project’s activity. Import issues CSV This release makes transitions easier. Users can now import issues into GitLab while managing their existing work. This feature works with Jira or any other issue tracking system that can generate a CSV export. Support catch-all email mailboxes This release supports sub-addressing and catch-all email mailboxes with a new email format that allows more email servers to be used with GitLab, including Microsoft Exchange and Google Groups. Include CI/CD files from other projects and templates With this release, users can now include their snippets of configuration from other projects and predefined templates. This release also includes snippets for specific jobs, like sast or dependency_scanning, so users can use them instead of copying and pasting the current definition. GitLab Runner 11.7 The team at GitLab also released GitLab Runner 11.7 yesterday. It is an open source project that is used to run CI/CD jobs and send the results back to GitLab. Major improvements In GitLab 11.7, the performance of viewing merge requests has been improved by caching syntax highlighted discussion diffs. Push performance has been improved by skipping pre-commit validations that have passed on other branches. Redundant counts in snippets search have been removed. This release comes with Mattermost 5.6, an open source Slack-alternative that includes interactive message dialogs, new admin tools, Ukrainian language support, etc. Users are generally happy with GitLab 11.7 release. One of the users who has been using GitLab for quite some time now is waiting for MR[0]. They commented on Hacker News, “I'm impatiently waiting for this MR [0] that will allow dependant containers to also talk to each other. It's the last missing piece for my ideal CI setup.” To which, GitLab’s product manager for Verify (CI) replied, “Thanks for bringing this up I hadn't seen your contribution! I think this is a great idea. I know the technical team has been overwhelmed with community contributions as of late - which is a good problem to have but one that we're still solving. I'm going to try and shepherd this one along myself.” Some users think if GitLab can pull off the npm registry well, then this might prove to be the beginning of a universal package management server built into Gitlab. One of the comments reads, “Gitlab API is amazingly simple and flexible, can be used efficiently from the terminal to list CI jobs, your issues, edit them.” Users are also comparing GitLab with GitHub, where some users are supporting GitHub. One user commented, “GitLab’s current homepage hides their actual site (the repositories) and makes it hard as a developer to actually get started compared to Github.” Another user commented, “We've started using Gitlab where I work and it's so much better than GitHub.” Users are also facing issues with memory optimization. One of the comments reads, “I like GitLab but noticed my Docker container running it is steadily requiring more memory to run smoothly. It’s sitting at 12GB right now, which is a little too high for my taste. I wish there were ways to reduce this.” Introducing GitLab Serverless to deploy cloud-agnostic serverless functions and applications GitLab 11.5 released with group security and operations-focused dashboard, control access to GitLab pages GitLab 11.4 is here with merge request reviews and many more features

Wine 4.0 stable version has been released yesterday. It comes with four main features including support for Vulkan, Direct3D 12, Game controllers and High-DPI support on Android. In total, there are over 6,000 individual changes and improvements. Wine is an implementation of the Windows Application Programming Interface (API) library. makes it possible to run Windows programs alongside Linux or any other Unix-like operating system. Wine can also be used to recompile a program into a format that Linux can understand more easily, though access to the Windows program source code is required. Major improvements in Wine 4.0 Direct3D 12 support Wine 4.0 provides initial support for Direct3D 12 and requires the vkd3d library and a Vulkan-capable graphics card. The Direct3D graphics card database recognizes more graphics cards. The Multi-Threaded Command Stream feature is enabled by default. The OpenGL core contexts are always used by default when available to all graphics cards, and all versions of Direct3D before 12. Several Direct3D 11 interfaces have been updated to version 11.2, and DXGI interfaces have been updated to version 1.6. Support for using the correct swap interval is implemented, for both DXGI and DirectDraw applications. Application-configurable frame latency is implemented for Direct3D 9Ex and DXGI applications. Vulkan Support In Wine 4.0, Vulkan driver is implemented, using the host Vulkan libraries under X11, or MoltenVK on macOS. Wine 4.0 also provides a built-in vulkan-1 loader as an alternative to the SDK loader. A number of Direct2D interfaces have been updated to version 1.2. Other features: ARGB visual can be used as default X11 visual. The old 16-bit DIB.DRV driver is implemented using the DIB engine. For large polygons, polygon drawing is much faster in the DIB engine. Improvements made in Kernel Support for running DOS binaries under Wine is removed. In wine 4.0, all the CPU control and debug registers can be accessed by kernel drivers, including on 64-bit. Events, semaphores, mutexes, and timers are also implemented in kernel mode for device drivers. The WaitOnAddress synchronization primitives are supported. Application settings, compatibility information, and execution levels are also recognized in application manifests. Other changes Wine 4.0 supports the new version of the Android graphics buffer allocator API to enable graphics support on Android version 8 and above. Android x86-64 platforms are supported also in 64-bit mode. New external dependencies The Vulkan library is used to implement the Vulkan graphics driver. The Vkd3d library is used to implement Direct3D 12 on top of Vulkan. The SDL library is used to support game controllers. The GSSAPI library is used to implement Kerberos authentication. These are a select few changes. For a full list of improvements and additions, check out the release notes. Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta; deprecates Btrfs filesystem Homebrew 1.9.0 released with periodic brew cleanup, beta support for Linux, Windows and more. Microsoft releases ProcDump for Linux, a Linux version of the ProcDump Sysinternals tool

Last Friday, the first release of Rails 6 was announced. Two new major frameworks are added in Rails 6.0 Beta 1 called Action Mailbox and Action Text. There are also two scalable upgrades in the form of multiple database support and parallel testing. Action Mailbox in Rails 6.0 Beta 1 This new framework guides incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes in order for processing to take place in Rails. Action Mailbox comes with ingresses for Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mandrill, Postmark, and SendGrid. Users can also manage incoming emails directly via the built-in Exim, Postfix, and Qmail ingresses. Action Text in Rails 6.0 Beta 1 This framework brings rich text and enables editing such files in Rails. The Trix editor is introduced to handle tasks like formatting to links, quotes, lists to embedded images and galleries. Trix editor has its own RichText model to save rich text generated by it. This model is associated with existing Active Record models in the application. Embedded images and other attachments are stored by default via Active Storage and they are associated with the RichText model. Multiple database support The introduction of multiple database support facilitates a single application to connect to multiple databases simultaneously. This can be done to segment certain records into their own databases for scaling or isolation. It can also be useful if you’re performing read/write splitting with replica databases to improve performance. Regardless of the applications, there’s a simple API in Rails 6.0 for this task without having to dig into Active Record internals. Support for parallel testing You can now utilize all the cores in your computer to run big test suites faster with parallel testing support. Every testing worker has a separate database and thread so all the CPUs will be utilized effectively. Webpacker is the default JavaScript bundler for Rails 6.0 via the new app/javascript directory. The asset pipeline with Sprockets for CSS and static assets integrate well while offering the best trade-off of advanced JavaScript features. Rails 6.0 will need Ruby 2.5.0 or later. Rails 6.0 Beta 2 should be out next month and the final release in April in time for the RailsConf 2019. You can look at the changelog files to know more about the changes. Ruby 2.6.0 released with a new JIT compiler GitHub addresses technical debt, now runs on Rails 5.2.1 7 Web design trends and predictions for 2019

Just two months ago Google’s TensorFlow, one of the most popular machine learning platforms celebrated its third birthday. Last year in August, Martin Wicke, engineer at Google, posted the list of what’s expected in TensorFlow 2.0, an open source machine learning framework, on the Google group. The key features listed by him include: This release will come with eager execution. This release will feature more platforms and languages along with improved compatibility. The deprecated APIs will be removed. Duplications will be reduced. https://twitter.com/aureliengeron/status/1030091835098771457 The early preview of TensorFlow 2.0 is expected soon. TensorFlow 2.0 is expected to come with high-level APIs, robust model deployment, powerful experimentation for research and simplified API. Easy model building with Keras This release will come with Keras, a user-friendly API standard for machine learning which will be used for building and training the models. As Keras provides various model-building APIs including sequential, functional, and subclassing, it becomes easier for users to choose the right level of abstraction for their project. Eager execution and tf.function TensorFlow 2.0 will also feature eager execution, which will be used for immediate iteration and debugging. The tf.function will easily translate the Python programs into TensorFlow graphs. The performance optimizations will remain optimum and by adding the flexibility, tf.function will ease the use of expressing programs in simple Python. Further, the tf.data will be used for building scalable input pipelines. Transfer learning with TensorFlow Hub The team at TensorFlow has made it much easier for those who are not into building a model from scratch. Users will soon get a chance to use models from TensorFlow Hub, a library for reusable parts of machine learning models to train a Keras or Estimator model. API Cleanup Many APIs are removed in this release, some of which are tf.app, tf.flags, and tf.logging. The main tf.* namespace will be cleaned by moving lesser used functions into sub packages such as tf.math. Few APIs have been replaced with their 2.0 equivalents like tf.keras.metrics, tf.summary, and tf.keras.optimizers. The v2 upgrade script can be used to automatically apply these renames. Major Improvements The queue runners will be removed in this release The graph collections will also get removed. The APIs will be renamed in this release for better usability. For example,  name_scope can be accessed using  tf.name_scope or tf.keras.backend.name_scope. For ease in migration to TensorFlow 2.0, the team at TensorFlow will provide a conversion tool for updating TensorFlow 1.x Python code for using TensorFlow 2.0 compatible APIs. It will flag the cases where code cannot be converted automatically. In this release, the stored GraphDefs or SavedModels will be backward compatible. With this release, the distribution to tf.contrib will no more be in use. Some of the existing contrib modules will be integrated into the core project or will be moved to a separate repository, rest of them will be removed. To know about this news, check out the post by the TensorFlow team on Medium. Building your own Snapchat-like AR filter on Android using TensorFlow Lite [ Tutorial ] Google expands its machine learning hardware portfolio with Cloud TPU Pods (alpha) to effectively train and deploy TensorFlow machine learning models on GCP Google researchers introduce JAX: A TensorFlow-like framework for generating high-performance code from Python and NumPy machine learning programs

In October last year, it was reported that LLVM (Low-Level Virtual Machine) is moving from Apache Subversion (SVN) to GitHub. Now the migration is complete and LLVM is available on GitHub. This transition was long under discussion and is now officially complete. LLVM is a toolkit for creating compilers, optimizers, and runtime environments. This migration comes in place as continuous integration is sometimes broken in LLVM because the SVN server was down. They migrated to GitHub for services lacking in SVN such as better 24/7 stability, disk space, code browsing, forking etc. GitHub is also used by most of the LLVM community. There already were unofficial mirrors on GitHub before this official migration. Last week, James Y Knight from the LLVM team wrote to a mailing list: “The new official monorepo is published to LLVM's GitHub organization, at: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project. At this point, the repository should be considered stable -- there won't be any more rewrites which invalidate commit hashes (barring some _REALLY_ good reason...)” Along with LLVM, this monorepo also hosts Clang, LLD, Compiler-RT, and other LLVM sub-projects. Commits are being made to the LLVM GitHub repository even at the time of writing and the repo currently has about 200 stars. Updated workflow documents and instructions on migrating user work that is in-progress are being drafted and will be available soon. This move was initiated after positive responses from LLVM community members to migrate to GitHub. If you want to be up to date with more details, you can follow the LLVM mailing list. LLVM will be relicensing under Apache 2.0 start of next year A libre GPU effort based on RISC-V, Rust, LLVM and Vulkan by the developer of an earth-friendly computer LLVM 7.0.0 released with improved optimization and new tools for monitoring

Last week three IDEs were ported to Haiku OS. Now, Haiku OS users can build applications with Netbeans, Intellij IDEA, and PyCharm. Haiku is an offspring of BeOS which was created by an ex-Apple executive, Jean Luis Gassee. Haiku’s development began in 2001, the first beta was released in September 2018. It is a single user system targeted specifically for personal computing. It uses a custom kernel, a fully threaded design, and a cohesive interface. Haiku houses the progressive concepts from BeOS and delivers it in a free and open source package. Now, let’s look at the package ports to Haiku. Haiko OS users can now run both Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEA with the OpenJDK8 x86_64 port. This is not in the depot yet, only in the haikuports recipe. Moreover, due to the efforts of another community member, a package for PyCharm Community Edition 2018.3 is also available. There are some minor issues and users have to work around a few settings to get things working. The addition of NetBeans IDE 8.2 and Intellij IDEA Community Edition 2018.3 to Haiku OS has many of its users excited. A comment on Hacker news says: “That's a really impressive achievement I think, those are complex applications running on complex stacks. It's certainly a big step in the direction of making Haiku a system that a developer could plausibly run for the development of cross-platform applications. This coupled with the Libre Office port last year means there's a pretty strong selection of applications for it cropping up.” Note that, by default Haiku comes with the dying Python 2.7 and the next major version, Python 3 can be installed via the package manager. To keep an eye on updates of these IDEs, head over to the Haiku forums. Haiku beta released with package management, a new preflet, webkit and more The Haiku operating system has released R1/beta1 Haiku, the open source BeOS clone, to release in beta after 17 years of development

On Tuesday, the team at Haiku released Haiku beta, an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. It is inspired by the BeOS and is fast, simple to use and easy to learn. What’s new in  Haiku? Package management This release comes with a complete package management system. Haiku’s packages are a special type of compressed filesystem image, that are mounted upon installation (and thereafter on each boot) by the packagefs, a kernel component. The /system/ hierarchy in Haiku beta is now read-only, since it is merely a combination of the presently installed packages at the system level and it ensures that the system files themselves are incorruptible. With this release, it is possible to boot into a previous package state or even blacklist individual files. Since the disk transactions for managing the packages are limited, the installations and uninstallations are instant. It is possible to manage the installed package set on a non-running Haiku system by mounting its boot disk and further manipulating the /system/packages directory and associated configuration files. It is now possible to switch your system repositories from master to r1beta1. WebPositive upgrades The system web browser is more stable than before with the YouTube now functioning properly and other under-the-hood changes . With WebKit it is possible to fix a large number of bugs in Haiku such as broken stack alignment, various kernel panics in the network stack, bad edge-case handling in app_server’s rendering core, missing support for extended transforms and gradients, broken picture-clipping support, missing POSIX functionality, etc. Haiku WebKit now also uses Haiku’s network protocol layer and supports Gopher. Completely rewritten network preflet The old network preflet has now been replaced with a completely new preflet, designed from the ground-up for ease of use and longevity. The preflet now can manage the network services on the machine, such as OpenSSH and ftpd. The preflet also uses a plugin-based API, so third-party network services (VPNs, web servers, etc) can integrate with it. User interface cleanup & live color updates A lot of miscellaneous cleanups to various parts of the user interface has been made since the last release. Mail and Tracker both have received a significant internal cleanup of their UI code. This release features Haiku-style toolbars and font-size awareness. Major improvements in Haiku Media subsystem improvements The media subsystem now features a large number of cleanups to the Media Kit to improve fault tolerance, latency correction, and performance issues. The HTTP and RTSP streaming support are now integrated into the I/O layer of the Media Kit. With this release, live streams can now be played in WebPositive via HTML5 audio/video support, or in the native MediaPlayer. FFmpeg decoder plugin improvements FFmpeg 4.0 is now used even on GCC2 builds. This release comes with added support for audio and video formats, as well as significant performance improvements. HDA driver improvements The driver for HDA (High-Definition Audio) chipsets now comes with audio chipsets in modern x86-based hardware. RemoteDesktop Haiku’s native RemoteDesktop application has been improved and added to the builds. This RemoteDesktop forwards drawing commands from the host system to the client system. RemoteDesktop doesn’t require any special server. It can easily connect and run applications on any Haiku system. SerialConnect This release comes with SerialConnect, which is a simple and straightforward graphical interface to serial ports. It supports arbitrary baud rates and certain extended features such as XMODEM file transfers. Built-in Debugger is now the default Haiku’s built-in Debugger has replaced GDB as the default debugger. It also features a command-line interface for those who prefer it. The debugger services the system-wide crash dialogs. launch_daemon The launch_daemon now includes support for service dependency tracking, lazy daemon startup, and automatic restart of daemons upon crashes. Updated filesystem drivers Haiku comes with NFSv4 client, a GSoC project, which is now included by default. Haiku’s userlandfs supports running filesystem drivers in userland, which is now shipped along with Haiku itself. It now supports running BeOS filesystem drivers which are not supported in kernel mode. To know more about this release, check out  Haiku’s release notes. The Haiku operating system has released R1/beta1 Haiku, the open source BeOS clone, to release in beta after 17 years of development KDevelop 5.3 released with new analyzer plugin and improved language support

Yesterday, the team at Apache NetBeans released Apache NetBeans IDE 10.0, an integrated development environment for Java. This release focuses on adding support for JDK 11, JUnit 5, PHP, JavaScript, and Groovy. What’s new in Apache NetBeans IDE 10.0? JDK 11 Support Integration with the nb-javac project is now possible. This integration adds support for JDK 11. The CORBA modules have been removed. This release comes with a support for JEP 309, Dynamic Class-File Constants. It also supports JEP 323, Local-Variable Syntax  and LVTI for Lambda parameters. PHP Support PHP 7.3 It is now possible to add trailing commas in function calls under PHP 7.3. This release comes with support for Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntaxes. PHP 7.2 This release comes with support for trailing commas in list syntax and coloring for object types for PHP 7.2. PHP 7.1 This release comes with class constant visibility, multi-catch exception handling, nullable types, support for keys in list(), coloring for new keywords (void, iterable) for PHP 7.1. JUnit 5 JUnit 5.3.1 has been added as a new Library to NetBeans, so users can easily add it to their Java projects. JUnit 5 is now the default JUnit version for Maven projects without any existing tests. This release supports JUnit 5 @Testable annotation. This version also supports a default JUnit 5 test template. OpenJDK This release automatically detects JTReg from OpenJDK configuration. Various improvements such as limiting directories that are scanned for modules have been made to the OpenJDK project. Few users have compared Apache NetBeans IDE 10.0 with Eclipse and Intellij most of them are on the opinion that this release is better than the two and it works better. Read more about this release in detail on Apache NetBeans’ official blog. Apache NetBeans 9.0 is now available with Java 9 & 10 support Apache NetBeans 9.0 RC1 released! The NetBeans Developer’s Life Cycle

Yesterday, the team at SpaceVim released the first stable version of SpaceVim v1.0.0, a distribution of the vim editor that manages collections of plugins in layers. This release comes with two major changes, : The behavior of 2-LeftMouse in vimfiler has been changed. The default font has been changed to SauceCodePro. What’s new in SpaceVim v1.0.0? This version comes with unicode spinners api. Layer option for autocomplete layer has been added. Function for customizing searching tools and Lang#scheme layer have been added. This release also comes with log for bootstrap function and updated runtime log for startup. Error key bindings and Spacevim debug info have been improved. This release comes with more key bindings for typescript. Even the align feature has been improved. Major bug fixes This release comes with Ctrlp support in windows. Layers list and vimdoc command has been fixed in windows. Statusline icon has been fixed. The issue with comment paragraphs key bindings has been resolved now. Missed syntax for detached FlyGrep has now been added. Log has been added in this release for generating configuration file. FlyGrep syntax has been improvedto support different outputs. Few users are confused between SpaceVim and Neovim. Neovim is more than a rewrite of vim. Its main functionality is to provide a server that allows other editors to edit a buffer in response to keystrokes. Whereas SpaceVim is just a configuration of vim. Users are also not sure of the performance of SapceVim and they are comparing it with Spacemacs, a configuration framework for GNU Emacs. To know more about this release in detail, visit SpaceVim release notes. Qt for Python 5.12 released with PySide2, Qt GUI and more Google Cloud releases a beta version of SparkR job types in Cloud Dataproc Eclipse 4.10.0 released with major improvements to colors, fonts preference page and more

Last week, Qt introduced Qt for Python 5.12, an official set of Python bindings for Qt, used for simplifying the creation of innovative and immersive user interfaces for Python applications. With Qt for Python 5.12, it is possible to quickly visualize the massive amounts of data tied to their Python development projects. https://twitter.com/qtproject/status/1076003585979232256 Qt for Python 5.12 comes with a cross-platform environment for all development needs. Qt’s user interface development framework features APIs and expansive graphics libraries. Qt for Python 5.12 provides the developers with a user-friendly platform. It is fully supported by the Qt Professional Services team of development experts and practitioners, as well as Qt’s global community. Lars Knoll, CTO of Qt, said, “Considering the huge data sets that Python developers work with on a daily basis, Qt’s graphical capabilities makes it a perfect fit for the creation of immersive Python user interfaces. With Qt for Python 5.12, our customers can build those user interfaces faster and more easily than ever before – with the knowledge that they are backed by a global team of Qt and user interface experts.” Features of Qt for Python 5.12 PySide2 Qt comes with a C++ framework, combined with the PySide2 Python module that offers a comprehensive set of bindings between Python and Qt Qt GUI Creation Qt Graphical User Interface (GUI) creation consists of the following functional modules: Qt Widgets: The Qt Widgets Module comes with a set of user interface elements for creating classic desktop-style user interfaces. Qt Quick: The Qt Quick module, a standard library for writing QML applications, contains Quick Controls for creating fluid user interfaces. Qt QML: The Qt QML module features a framework for developing applications and libraries with the QML language, a declarative language that allows user interfaces to be described in terms of their visual components. Environment familiarity: Qt for Python 5.12 comes with a familiar development environment for Python developers. PyPI: Python Package Index (PyPI) makes the installation process of Qt for Python 5.12 easy. VFX Reference Platform integration: Qt and Qt for Python 5.12 are integral parts of the VFX Reference Platform, a set of tool and library versions used for building software for the VFX industry. Qt 3D Animation: The Qt 3D animation module features a set of prebuilt elements to help developers get started with Qt 3D. Qt Sql: It provides a driver layer, SQL API layer, and a user interface layer for SQL databases. Qt for Python 5.12 is available under commercial licensing, as part of the products Qt for Application Development and Qt for Device Creation, and as open-source under the LGPLv3 license. Qt TextToSpeech: It provides an API for accessing text-to-speech engines. Easy and quick development Development with Qt for Python 5.12 is fun, fast and flexible. Developers can easily work on their applications using Qt for Python 5.12. Developers can power their UI development by utilizing ready-made widgets, controls, beautiful charts, and data visualizations and create stunning 2D/3D graphics for Python projects. Qt Community Developers can exchange ideas, learn, share, and connect with the Qt community. Global Qt Services Global Qt services provide tailored support at every stage of the product development lifecycle. What’s next in Qt for Python The team at Qt might simplify the deployment of PySide2 applications. They might also provide a smoother interaction with other Python modules and support other platforms like embedded and mobile. Users are excited about this project and are eagerly waiting for the stable release. Qt for Python will be helpful for developers as it makes the process of developing desktop apps easier. But few users still are with PyQt5 as the stable release for Qt for python hasn’t been rolled out yet. The switch from PyQt to PySide might be difficult for many. To know more about Qt for Python 5.12, check out Qt’s official website. Getting started with Qt Widgets in Android Qt Design Studio 1.0 released with Qt photoshop bridge, timeline based animations and Qt live preview Qt team releases Qt Creator 4.8.0 and Qt 5.12 LTS

Last week, a new traffic analysis framework, Netcap (NETwork CAPture) was released. It converts a stream of network packets into accessible type-safe structured data for representing specific protocols or custom abstractions. https://twitter.com/dreadcode/status/1076267396577533952 This project was implemented in Go programming language that provides a garbage collected memory safe runtime as parsing of untrusted input could be dangerous. It was developed for a series of experiments like filtering, dataset labeling, encoding, error logging, etc in the thesis: Implementation and evaluation of secure and scalable anomaly-based network intrusion detection. The Netcap project won the second place at Kaspersky Labs SecurIT Cup 2018 in Budapest. Why was Netcap introduced? Corporate communication networks are attacked frequently with previously unseen malware or insider threats, which makes defense mechanisms such as anomaly-based intrusion detection systems necessary for detecting security incidents. The signature-based and anomaly detection strategies rely on features extracted from the network traffic that requires secure and extensible collection strategies. The solutions that are available are written in low-level system programming languages that require manual memory management and suffer from vulnerabilities that allow a remote attacker to disable the network monitor. Others lack in terms of flexibility and data availability. To tackle these problems and ease future experiments with anomaly-based detection techniques, Netcap was released. Netcap uses Google's protocol buffers for encoding its output which helps in accessing it across a wide range of programming languages. The output can also be emitted as comma separated values, which is a common input format for data analysis tools and systems. Netcap is extensible and it provides multiple ways of adding support for new protocols and also implements the parsing logic in a memory safe way. It provides high dimensional data of observed traffic and allows the researcher to focus on new approaches for detecting malicious behavior in network environments, instead of opting data collection mechanisms and post-processing steps. It features a concurrent design that makes use of multi-core architectures. This command-line tool focuses on usability and readability and displays progress when processing packets. Why Go? Go, commonly referred to as Golang, is a statically typed programming language which was released by Google in 2009. Netcap opted Go as its syntax is similar to the C programming language and also has a lot of adopted ideas from other languages, such as Python and Erlang. It is commonly used for network programming and backend implementation. With Go Netcap can compile faster and generate statically linked binaries, easily. Goroutine, an asynchronous process is multiplexed onto threads of the OS as required. In case a goroutine blocks, the corresponding OS thread blocks as well, but the other goroutines aren’t affected. So, this proves to be helpful in Netcap as it doesn’t disturb the functioning. Also, Goroutines are less expensive as compared to a thread and allocate resources dynamically as needed. Since, Go offers channels as a lightweight way to communicate between goroutines, the synchronization and messaging process gets easier in Netcap. Design Goals of Netcap Netcap provides memory safety when parsing untrusted input. It features ease of extension. The output format is interoperable with many different programming languages. It features concurrent design. It comes with output with small storage footprint on disk. It provides with maximum data availability. It allows implementation of custom abstractions It comes with a rich platform and architecture support Future Scope Future development on Netcap will focus on increasing the unit test coverage and performance critical operations. The output of Netcap will be compared to other tools, to ensure no data is missed or misinterpreted. Netcap will be extended in future with functionalities like support for extracted features. This framework might be used for experiments on datasets for accurate predictions on network data. Encoding feature vectors could also be implemented as part of the Netcap framework. An interface for adding additional application layer encoders can be added in future. Netcap will be evaluated for monitoring industrial control systems communication. The recently open sourced fingerprinting strategy for SSH handshakes (HASSH) by salesforce could prove beneficial in future. Check the slides of this project from the presentation by Philipp Mieden (the creator of Netcap) at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities on Researchgate. Many users are appreciating the efforts taken for this project and eagerly awaiting for the features that might be released in the future. But a few Hacker News users think that the functionality provided by this application is still unclear. The thesis misses a lot of points with the major one being as to how this tool is actually warranted as a whole. The question is as to how will the anomalies of this project get detected? A lot of questions are still unanswered but it would be interesting to see what Philipp comes up with next. https://twitter.com/mythicalcmd/status/1076459582963310593 Stanford researchers introduce DeepSolar, a deep learning framework that mapped every solar panel in the US Netflix adopts Spring Boot as its core Java framework Facebook open-sources PyText, a PyTorch based NLP modeling framework

Yesterday, the team at Eclipse release Eclipse 4.10.0, SDK project. Eclipse 4.10.0 is a part of Eclipse IDE 2018-12. This release features improved views, options, dialogs,Java editor and more. https://twitter.com/EclipseJavaIDE/status/1075422538484846597 Improvements to Eclipse 4.10.0 Views and dialogs The Quick Switch Editor (Ctrl+E) dialog for editor selection has been improved and now shows the path of the resource along with its filename. In Eclipse 4.10.0, the Workspace selection dialog shows completion proposals for making the process of picking a workspace with the keyboard easier. It is now possible to convert a plug-in project to a modular project by selecting the Configure > Create module-info.java context menu. This creates the module-info.java file for the project. Colors, Fonts preference page The Colors and Font preference page has been updated and it now supports searching for font, font height, and font style. The search has been updated allowing the users to quickly see where a font is used or where a specific style or size is used. This release comes with a new option that disables API analysis builder on the Plug-in Development preference page. Chevron button for hidden tabs The chevron button now shows the number of tabs that are hidden. It doesn't have transparency artifacts anymore, which makes it more readable especially in the dark theme. Added support for custom URL schemes in Eclipse 4.10.0 This release can handle custom URL schemes such as https, ssh, and git. When a user clicks on a link with a specific custom URL scheme, Eclipse first starts and then handles the clicked link. Users can now control the URL schemes that should be handled by the current Eclipse installation via General > Link Handlers preference page. ContentAssistant class The ContentAssistant class now allows consumers to configure whether the completion proposal trigger characters are honored or ignored. If ContentAssistant.enableCompletionProposalTriggerChars(false) is used, then completion proposal trigger characters are ignored and the users have to press the Enter key to trigger insertion. If ContentAssistant.enableCompletionProposalTriggerChars(true) is used, then completion proposal trigger characters can be used alongwith the Enter key to insert the proposal. If the enableCompletionProposalTriggerChars(boolean) method is not called, then the default behaviour is equivalent to calling enableCompletionProposalTriggerChars(true) so that extra trigger characters are honored. Java Editor Eclipse 4.10.0 comes with a quick fix Change project compliance and JRE to 11. This release comes with a quick assist, that allows adding var type to lambda parameters. This quick assist will only be available if the project compliance is Java 11 or above. An option to set compiler compliance to 11 on a Java project is now available. With this release, Java editor now shows the number of implementations and references for a Java element as decorative text (Code Minings) above the element. Read more about this news on Eclipse’ blog. Eclipse IDE’s Photon release will support Rust Will Ethereum eclipse Bitcoin? Apache Maven and m2eclipse

The November 2018 release of Visual Studio code (version 1.30) is now available. This version has multiline search improvements, custom tile bars for Linux, a simplified debug configuration and other changes. We take a look at the major updates in the November 2018 of Visual studio code. Multiline search input In the October release, support for multiline search was added. Now, the search UX has been improved for easier usage. Users can search with multiline text without writing a regular expression. Press Shift+Enter in the search box to insert a newline. The search box will grow to show the full multiline query. Users can also copy paste multiple lines from the editor into the search box. Custom title and menu bar on Linux by default The accessibility and themability of menus has been improving over the past releases on Windows through the custom title and menu bar. This was optionally available on Linux, it will now be enabled by default. You can use the native title bar by setting the window.titleBarStyle to native. References view The References view has moved out of preview and is now available generally. There are two commands: Find All References: Opens the References view. Peek References: Opens references in a Peek view. Hidden on startup, the References view will remain visible once it has been used. When all search results are cleared, a history of previous searches is shown. Snippet comment variables New snippet variables are available that insert line or block comments to honor the current language. BLOCK_COMMENT_START and BLOCK_COMMENT_END for using block comments and LINE_COMMENT for lines. JavaScript and TypeScript callbacks look better Any JavaScript and TypeScript anonymous callbacks were previously labeled as <function>. This was in the Outline view, breadcrumbs view, and document symbol list. Due to this, it was impossible to tell which function a developer was really after. TypeScript 3.2+ allows VS Code to display more context for callback functions, so now they can be differentiated from one another. Markdown elements in JSDoc comments are highlighted Fenced code blocks and other Markdown elements within JSDoc blocks are now syntax-highlighted. Initial debug configuration is simplified In this release, an area of improvement was to simplify the generated launch.json file for the most popular debug extensions. The goal was to encourage users to start and configure debugging. Unnecessary launch configuration attributes were hidden. Using the Quick Pick UI for better user interaction while generating the initial launch.json was also a part of this. Run on folder open A task that users always run on opening a folder can now be configured to run automatically. This can be done by configuring its "runOn" property when that folder is opened. This was done to make sure no one breaks the new strict null checks in the VS Code repository. On adding "runOn": "folderOpen", everyone who allows tasks to be run automatically will get markers the strict null check is violated. Install previous versions A previous version of an extension can be used if the current version has problems. An Install Another Version action is provided on an installed extension, on clicking it, a dropdown of available versions is shown. Preview Features HTML custom tags / attributes support is added which allows developers to specify a list of tags and attributes that VS Code loads during startup. Network proxy support for extensions for enabling network proxy support for all extensions by using Http: Proxy Support. Code completion suggestions via IntelliCode comes to C++ in Visual Studio 2019 Microsoft Connect(); 2018 Azure updates: Azure Pipelines extension for Visual Studio Code, GitHub releases and much more! Neuron: An all-inclusive data science extension for Visual Studio

Last week, the team at GitHub released Git v2.20.0, a free and open source distributed version control system that tracks changes in computer files and coordinates work on those files among multiple people. Features Git clone process gets better with Git v2.20.0 The Git clone process will now warn users while they are cloning a project to a case-insensitive file-system, where there are files in the repository that only differ with their cases but have the same pathnames. Git v2.20.0 requires Vista With this new release, Git will now at least require Windows Vista or above versions to operate. Improvements to the Windows port has been observed, such as better support and DLL handling of nanosecond resolution file timestamps. Even the logic for selecting the default username and e-mail on Windows has been improved. Shows a progress bar The git status now shows a progress bar when refreshing the index takes a long time. Git multi-pack-index has been updated The git multi-pack-index has been updated for detecting corruption in the .midx file, and this feature has been integrated into "git fsck". Consolidation When there are too many packfiles in a repository, looking up an object requires consulting multiple pack .idx files. Git v2.20.0 comes with a new mechanism which consolidates all of these .idx files in a single file. Major Improvements The generation of (experimental) commit-graph files now shows progress in the output. On platforms with recent cURL library, http.sslBackend configuration variable can now be used for choosing a different SSL backend at runtime. With Windows port, it is possible to switch between OpenSSL and secure channel while talking over the HTTPS protocol. A pattern with '**' that does not have a slash on either side was considered an invalid one in previous versions. With this update, double-asterisks are treated the same way as two asterisks adjacent to each other are. "git rev-list --stdin </dev/null" initially used to be an error in the previous version but it now shows no output without an error. The developer builds in Git now use Wunused-function compilation option. With this release, it is possible to create an alias that expands to another alias. The test scripts have been updated in Gitv2.20.0 for style and correct handling of exit status of various commands. Major bug fixes The issue with registering same path under multiple worktree entries has been fixed. The "git interpret-trailers" had a buggy code that ignored patch text after committing log message and that triggered various codepaths. This has been fixed now. The bug that leaves the index file corrupt during a partial commit has been fixed now. This release has received some positive response from users.  An interesting fact stated by one of the users on Twitter is, “In Git for Windows, if we build cURL on one machine,it will run on an estimated 3 million different machines. This release has already created some buzz around, it would be interesting to see what GitHub plans next.” Read more about this news on the official mailing list. Upgrade to Git 2.19.1 to avoid a Git submodule vulnerability that causes arbitrary code execution Git 2.19.0 released with better git grep, Python 3 compatibility for git p4 4 myths about Git and GitHub you should know about

Last week, Microsoft announced in a blog that IntelliCode code completion suggestions will come to Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2019. There are some common usage patterns that occur after coding for some time. For example, an open stream will be closed eventually. When a string is used in the context of an if-statement, it is usually to check if the string is empty or has a certain size. Developers identify and use these coding patterns over time. IntelliCode already knows these common patterns and can suggest them to the developers as code. With the help of machine learning, IntelliCode trains over thousands of real-world projects which includes open-source projects on GitHub. So, IntelliCode will be of most help to developers when using common libraries like STL. IntelliCode saves time by putting most used items on the top of the IntelliSense completion list. On using the IntelliCode extension for a while, starred items will begin to appear at the top of Member List. They are IntelliCode recommendations. In a future release of the extension, Microsoft will give C++ developers the ability to let IntelliCode learn from their own code. They are also considering adding C++ IntelliCode support to Visual Studio Code. This is a welcome feature for developers, as it saves them time. A comment on Hacker News reads: “That's very nice and I'll probably be using it a lot, after VS2019 will stabilize (it's just a preview now). However, the fact that this thing works so well, says a lot about the design of C++ standard library. They should have encapsulated the pair of iterators into a single structure, and implement implicit casts from vectors/arrays to that object. Requiring to type begin/end every single time is counterproductive.” For more details, visit the Microsoft Blog. Visual Studio 2019: New features you should expect to see Neuron: An all-inclusive data science extension for Visual Studio Microsoft releases the Python Language Server in Visual Studio