How-To Tutorials - Web Development

Wasmer, the WebAssembly runtime have been successfully embedded in many languages like Rust, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Go. Yesterday, Ivan Enderlin, a PhD Computer Scientist at Wasmer, announced a new Postgres extension version 0.1 for WebAssembly. Since the project is still under heavy development, the extension only supports integers (on 32- and 64-bits) and works on Postgres 10 only. It also does not support strings, records, views or any other Postgres types yet. https://twitter.com/WasmWeekly/status/1167330724787171334 The official post states, “The goal is to gather a community and to design a pragmatic API together, discover the expectations, how developers would use this new technology inside a database engine.” The Postgres extension provides two foreign data wrappers wasm.instances and wasm.exported_functions in the wasm foreign schema. The wasm.instances is a table with an id and wasm_file columns. The wasm.exported_functions is a table with the instance_id, name, inputs, and outputs columns. Enderlin says that these information are enough for the wasm Postgres extension “to generate the SQL function to call the WebAssembly exported functions.” Read Also: Wasmer introduces WebAssembly Interfaces for validating the imports and exports of a Wasm module The Wasmer team ran a basic benchmark of computing the Fibonacci sequence computation to compare the execution time between WebAssembly and PL/pgSQL. The benchmark was run on a MacBook Pro 15" from 2016, 2.9Ghz Core i7 with 16Gb of memory. Image Source: Wasmer The result was that, “Postgres WebAssembly extension is faster to run numeric computations. The WebAssembly approach scales pretty well compared to the PL/pgSQL approach, in this situation.” The Wasmer team believes that though it is too soon to consider WebAssembly as an alternative to PL/pgSQL, the above result makes them hopeful that it can be explored more. To know more about Postgres extension, check out its Github page. 5 barriers to learning and technology training for small software development teams Mozilla CEO Chris Beard to step down by the end of 2019 after five years in the role JavaScript will soon support optional chaining operator as its ECMAScript proposal reaches stage 3

Managing, supporting, and facilitating training for software developers isn’t easy. Such is the pace of change that it can be tough to ensure that not only do your developers have the skills they need, but also that they have the resources at their disposal to explore new technologies, try new approaches and solve complex problems. Okay, sure: there are a wealth of free resources out there. But using these is really just learning to walk for many developers. It’s essential, but it can’t be the only thing developers have at their disposal. If it is, their company is doing them a disservice. Even if a company is committed to their team’s development, how to go about it still isn’t straightforward. There are a number of barriers that need to be overcome when it comes to technology training and learning. Here are 5 of them... Barrier 1: Picking resources on the right topics The days of developers specializing are long gone - particularly in a small tech team where everyone has to get stuck in. Full-stack has ensured that today’s software developers need to be confident on everything from databases to UI design, while DevOps means they need to assume responsibility for how their code actually runs in production. The days of it worked on my machine! are over. Read next: DevOps engineering and full-stack development – 2 sides of the same agile coin When you factor in cloud native and hybrid cloud, developers today might well not only be working on cloud platforms with a bewildering array of features and opportunities, but also working on a number of different platforms at once. This means that understanding exactly what your developers need to know can be immensely difficult. It also means that you have to set the technology agenda from the off, immediately limiting your developers ability to solve problems themselves. That’s only going to alienate your developers - you’re effectively telling them that their curiosity, and their desire to explore new topics and alternative solutions is pointless. What can you do? The only way to solve this is to ensure your developers have a rich set of learning resources. Don’t limit them to a specific tool or set of technologies. Allow them to explore new topics as they see fit - don’t force them down a pre-set path. The other benefit of this is that it means you can be flexible and open in terms of the technology you use. Barrier 2: Legacy software and brownfield projects Sometimes, however, you can’t be flexible about the technology you use. Your developers simply need to use existing tools to manage legacy systems and brownfield projects (which build on or demolish existing legacy software). This means that learning needs can become complex. Not only might your development team needs a diverse range of skills for one particular project, they might also need to learn very different skill sets for different projects. Maybe you’re planning a new project built in React.js - great, get your developers on some cutting-edge content. But then, alongside this, what if they also need to tackle legacy software built using PHP? It’s fine if they know PHP, but what if you have a new developer? Or what if they haven’t used it for years? What can you do? As above, a rich set of training and learning resources is vital. But in this instance it’s particularly important to ensure developers have access to learning materials on a wide range of technologies. So yes, cutting-edge topic coverage is essential, but so is content on established and even more residual technologies. Barrier 3: Lack of time for learning new software skills and concepts Lack of time is one of the biggest barriers to learning and training in the tech industry. At least that’s the perception - in reality, a lack of time to learn is caused by resource challenges, and the cultural status of learning inside an organization. If it isn’t a priority, then it’s often the thing that gets pushed back as new day to day activities manage to insert themselves in your team’s day or existing ones stretch out to fill the hours in a way that no one expected. This is risky. Although there are times when things simply need to get done quickly, overlooking learning will not only lead to disengagement in your team, it will also leave them unprepared for challenges that may emerge throughout the course of a project. It’s often said that software development is all about solving problems - but how confident can we be that we’re equipped to solve them if we’re not committed to making time for learning? What can you do? The first step is obvious: make time for learning. One method is to set aside a specific period in the week which your team is encouraged to use for personal development. While that can work well, sometimes trying to structure learning in this way can make it feel like a chore for employees, as if you’re trying to fit them into a predetermined routine. Another option is to simply encourage continuous learning. That might mean a short period every day just to learn a new concept or approach. Or it could be something like a learning diary that allows developers to record things they learn and plan what they want to learn next. Essentially, what’s important is putting your developers in control. Give them the tools to make time - as well as the resources that they can use quickly and easily, and they’ll not only learn new skills much more quickly, they’ll also be more engaged and more curious engineers. Read next: “All of my engineering teams have a machine learning feature on their roadmap” – Will Ballard talks artificial intelligence in 2019 [Interview] Barrier 4: Different learning preferences within the team In even a small engineering team, every person will have unique needs and preferences when it comes to learning. So, even if all your team wants to learn the same topics, they still might disagree about how they want to do it. Some developers, for example, can’t stand learning with video. It forces you to learn at its pace, and - shock horror - you have to listen to someone. Others, however, love it - it’s visual, immediate and, you know, maybe having someone with a voice explaining how things work isn’t actually that bad? Similarly, some people love training courses - the idea of sitting with someone, rather than going it alone - while others value their independence and agency. This means that keeping everyone happy can be tough. It might be tempting to go one of two ways - either decide how you want people to learn and let them get on with it, or let everyone go it alone, but neither approach is ideal. Forcing people to learn a certain way will penalise those who don’t like your preferred learning method, hurting not only their ability to learn new skills but also their trust with you. Letting everyone be independent, meanwhile, means you never have any oversight on what people are doing or using - there’s no level playing field. What can you do? The key to getting over this barrier is balance. You want to preserve your team's independence and sense of agency while also having some transparency over what people are using. Resources that offer a mix of formats are great for this. That way, no one is forced to watch hours and hours of video courses or to trawl through text that will just send them to sleep. Equally, another important thing to think about is how the learning resources you provide your team complement other learning activities that they may be doing independently (things like looking for answers to questions in blog posts or on YouTube). By doing that you can allow your developers some level of independence while also ensuring that you have a set of organizational resources and tools that are available and accessible to everyone. Read next: Why do IT teams need to transition from DevOps to DevSecOps? Barrier 5: The cost of technology training and learning resources Cost is perhaps the biggest barrier to training for development teams. Specific courses and events can be astronomical - especially if more than one person needs to attend - and even some learning platforms can cost significant amounts of money. Now, that’s not always a problem for engineering teams operating in a more corporate or enterprise environment. But for smaller teams in small and medium sized businesses, training can become quite an overhead. In turn, this can have other consequences - from a complete disregard and deprioritization of training and learning to internal frustration at who is getting support and investment and who isn’t, it’s not uncommon to see training become a catalyst for many other organizational and cultural problems. What can you do? The trick here is to not invest heavily in one single thing. Don’t blow your budget on a single course - what if it’s not up to scratch? Don’t commit to an expensive learning platform. However good the marketing looks, if your team doesn't like it they’re certainly not going to use it. Fortunately, there are affordable solutions out there that can ensure you’re not breaking the bank when it comes to training. It might even leave you with some cash left over that you can invest on other resources and materials. Learning new skills isn’t easy. It requires patience and commitment. But developers need support and resources to take some of the strain out of their learning challenges. There’s no one way to meet the learning needs of developers. But Packt for Teams can help you overcome many of the barriers of developer training. Learn more here.

On Thursday last week, Twitter account @heydonworks posted a tweet that “Vue developers like cooking/quiet activities and React developers like trump, guns, weightlifting and being "bros". He also talked about the rising number of super conservative React dev accounts. https://twitter.com/heydonworks/status/1164506235518910464 This was met with disapproval from people within both the React and Vue communities. “Front end development isn’t a competition,” remarked one user. https://twitter.com/mattisadev/status/1164633489305739267 https://twitter.com/nsantos_pessoal/status/1164629726499102720 @heydonworks responded to the chorus of disapproval by saying that his intention was to  highlight how a broad and diverse community of thousands of people can be eclipsed by an aggressive and vocal toxic minority. He then went on to ask Dan Abramov, React co-founder, “Perhaps a public disowning of the neocon / supremacist contingent on your part would land better than my crappy joke?” https://twitter.com/heydonworks/status/1164653560598093824 He also clarified how his original tweet was supposed to paint a picture of what React would be like if it was taken over by hypermasculine conservatives. “I admit it's not obvious”, he tweeted, “but I am on your side. I don't want that to happen and the joke was meant as a warning.” @heydonworks also accused a well known React Developer of playing "the circle game" at a React conference. The “circle game” is a school prank that has more recently come to be associated with white supremacism in the U.S. @heydonworks later deleted this tweet and issued  an apology admitting that he was wrong to accuse the person of making the gesture. https://twitter.com/heydonworks/status/1165439718512824320 This conversation then developed into a wider argument about how toxicity is enabled and allowed in the React community - and, indeed, other tech communities as well. The crucial point that many will have to reckon with is what behaviors people allow and overlook. Indeed, to a certain extent, the ability to be comfortable with certain behaviors is related to an individual’s privilege - what may seem merely an aspect or a quirk of someone’s persona to one person, might be threatening and a cause of discomfort to another person. This was the point made by web developer Nat Alison (@tesseralis): “Remember that fascists and abusers can often seem like normal people to everyone but the people that they're harming.” Alison’s thread highlights that associating with people without challenging toxic behaviors or attitudes is a way of enabling and tacitly supporting them. https://twitter.com/tesseralis/status/1165111494062641152 Web designer Tatiana Mac quits the tech industry following the React controversy Web designer Tatiana Mac’s talk at Clarity Conf (you can see the slides here) in San Francisco last week (21 August) took place just a few hours before @heydonworks sent the first of his tweets mentioned above. The talk was a powerful statement on how systems can be built in ways that can either reinforce power or challenge it. Although it was well-received by many present at the event and online, it also was met with hostility, with one Twitter user (now locked) tweeting in response to an image of Mac’s talk that it “most definitely wasn't a tech conference… Looks to be some kind of SJW (Social justice warrior) conference.” This only added an extra layer of toxicity to the furore that has been engulfing the React community. Following the talk, Mac offered her thoughts, criticizing those she described as being more interested in “protecting the reputation of a framework than listening to multiple marginalized people.” https://twitter.com/TatianaTMac/status/1164912554876891137 She adds, “I don’t perceive this problem in the other JS framework communities as intensively.  Do White Supremacists exist in other frameworks? Likely. But there is a multiplier/feeder here that is systemically baked. That’s what I want analysed by the most ardent supporters of the community.” She says that even after bringing this issue multiple times, she has been consistently ignored. Her tweet reads, “I'm disappointed by repeatedly bringing this shit up and getting ignored/gaslit, then having a white woman bring it up and her getting praised for it? White supremacy might as well be an opiate—some people take it without ever knowing, others microdose it to get ahead.” “Why is no one like, ‘Tatiana had good intentions in bringing up the rampant racism problem in our community?’ Instead, it’s all, ‘Look at all the impact it had on two white guys!’ Is cuz y’all finally realise intent doesn’t erase impact?”, she adds. She has since decided to quit the tech industry following these developments. In a tweet, she wrote that she is “incredibly sad, disappointed, and not at all surprised by *so* many people.” Mac has described in detail the emotional and financial toll the situation is having on her. She has said she is committed to all contracts through to 2020, but also revealed that she may need to sell belongings to support herself. This highlights the potential cost involved in challenging the status quo. To provide clarity on what has happened, Tatiana approached her friend, designer Carlos Eriksson, who put together a timeline of the Reactgate controversy. Dan Abramov and Ken Wheeler quit and then rejoin Twitter Following the furore, both Dan Abramov and Ken Wheeler quit Twitter over the weekend. They have now rejoined. After he deactivated, Abramov talked about his disappearance from Twitter on Reddit: “Hey all. I'm fine, and I plan to be back soon. This isn't a ‘shut a door in your face’ kind of situation.  The real answer is that I've bit off more social media than I can chew. I've been feeling anxious for the past few days and I need a clean break from checking it every ten minutes. Deactivating is a barrier to logging in that I needed. I plan to be back soon.” Abramov returned to Twitter on August 27. He apologized for his sudden disappearance. He apologized, calling deactivating his account “a desperate and petty thing.” He also thanked Tatiana Mac for highlighting issues in the React community. “I am deeply thankful to @TatianaTMac for highlighting issues in the React community,” Abramov wrote. “She engaged in a dialog despite being on the receiving end of abuse and brigading. I admire her bravery and her kindness in doing the emotional labor that should have fallen on us instead.” Wheeler also returned to Twitter. “Moving forward, I will be working to do better. To educate myself. To lift up minoritized folks. And to be a better member of the community. And if you are out there attacking and harassing people, you are not on my side,” he said. Mac acknowledged  Abramov and Wheeler’s apologies, writing that, “it is unfair and preemptive to call Dan and Ken fragile. Both committed to facing the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy head on. I support the promise and will be watching from the sidelines supporting positive influence.” What can the React community do to grow from this experience? This news has shaken the React community to the core. At such distressing times, the React community needs to come together as a whole and offer constructive criticism to tackle the issue of unhealthy tribalism, while making minority groups feel safe and heard. Tatiana puts forward a few points to tackle the toxic culture. “Pay attention to your biggest proponents and how they reject all discussion of the injustices of tech. It’s subtle like that, and, it’s as overt as throwing white supremacist hand gestures at conferences on stage. Neither is necessarily more dangerous than the other, but instead shows the journey and spectrum of radicalization—it’s a process.” She urges, “If you want to clean up the community, you’ve got to see what systemic forces allow these hateful dingdongs to sit so comfortably in your space.  I’m here to help and hope I have today already, as a member of tech, but I need you to do the work there.” “Developers don’t belong on a pedestal, they’re doing a job like everyone else” – April Wensel on toxic tech culture and Compassionate Coding [Interview] Github Sponsors: Could corporate strategy eat FOSS culture for dinner? Microsoft’s #MeToo reckoning: female employees speak out against workplace harassment and discrimination

Yesterday marked an end of an era for Mercurial users, as Bitbucket announced to no longer support Mercurial repositories after May 2020. Bitbucket, owned by Atlassian, is a web-based version control repository hosting service, for source code and development projects. It has used Mercurial since the beginning in 2008 and then Git since October 2011. Now almost after ten years of sharing its journey with Mercurial, the Bitbucket team has decided to remove the Mercurial support from the Bitbucket Cloud and its API. The official announcement reads, “Mercurial features and repositories will be officially removed from Bitbucket and its API on June 1, 2020.” The Bitbucket team also communicated the timeline for the sunsetting of the Mercurial functionality. After February 1, 2020 users will no longer be able to create new Mercurial repositories. And post June 1, 2020 users will not be able to use Mercurial features in Bitbucket or via its API and all Mercurial repositories will be removed. Additionally all current Mercurial functionality in Bitbucket will be available through May 31, 2020. The team said the decision was not an easy one for them and Mercurial held a special place in their heart. But according to a Stack Overflow Developer Survey, almost 90% of developers use Git, while Mercurial is the least popular version control system with only about 3% developer adoption. Apart from this Mercurial usage on Bitbucket saw a steady decline, and the percentage of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial fell to less than 1%. Hence they decided on removing the Mercurial repos. How can users migrate and export their Mercurial repos Bitbucket team recommends users to migrate their existing Mercurial repos to Git. They have also extended support for migration, and kept the available options open for discussion in their dedicated Community thread. Users can discuss about conversion tools, migration, tips, and also offer troubleshooting help. If users prefer to continue using the Mercurial system, there are a number of free and paid Mercurial hosting services for them. The Bitbucket team has also created a Git tutorial that covers everything from the basics of creating pull requests to rebasing and Git hooks. Community shows anger and sadness over decision to discontinue Mercurial support There is an outrage among the Mercurial users as they are extremely unhappy and sad with this decision by Bitbucket. They have expressed anger not only on one platform but on multiple forums and community discussions. Users feel that Bitbucket’s decision to stop offering Mercurial support is bad, but the decision to also delete the repos is evil. On Hacker News, users speculated that this decision was influenced by potential to market rather than based on technically superior architecture and ease of use. They feel GitHub has successfully marketed Git and that's how both have become synonymous to the developer community. One of them comments, “It's very sad to see bitbucket dropping mercurial support. Now only Facebook and volunteers are keeping mercurial alive. Sometimes technically better architecture and user interface lose to a non user friendly hard solutions due to inertia of mass adoption. So a lesson in Software development is similar to betamax and VHS, so marketing is still a winner over technically superior architecture and ease of use. GitHub successfully marketed git, so git and GitHub are synonymous for most developers. Now majority of open source projects are reliant on a single proprietary solution Github by Microsoft, for managing code and project. Can understand the difficulty of bitbucket, when Python language itself moved out of mercurial due to the same inertia. Hopefully gitlab can come out with mercurial support to migrate projects using it from bitbucket.” Another user comments that Mercurial support was the only reason for him to use Bitbucket when GitHub is miles ahead of Bitbucket. Now when it stops supporting Mercurial too, Bitbucket will end soon. The comment reads, “Mercurial support was the one reason for me to still use Bitbucket: there is no other Bitbucket feature I can think of that Github doesn't already have, while Github's community is miles ahead since everyone and their dog is already there. More importantly, Bitbucket leaves the migration to you (if I read the article correctly). Once I download my repo and convert it to git, why would I stay with the company that just made me go through an annoying (and often painful) process, when I can migrate to Github with the exact same command? And why isn't there a "migrate this repo to git" button right there? I want to believe that Bitbucket has smart people and that this choice is a good one. But I'm with you there - to me, this definitely looks like Bitbucket will die.” On Reddit, programming folks see this as a big change from Bitbucket as they are the major mercurial hosting provider. And they feel Bitbucket announced this at a pretty short notice and they require more time for migration. Apart from the developer community forums, on Atlassian community blog as well users have expressed displeasure. A team of scientists commented, “Let's get this straight : Bitbucket (offering hosting support for Mercurial projects) was acquired by Atlassian in September 2010. Nine years later Atlassian decides to drop Mercurial support and delete all Mercurial repositories. Atlassian, I hate you :-) The image you have for me is that of a harmful predator. We are a team of scientists working in a university. We don't have computer scientists, we managed to use a version control simple as Mercurial, and it was a hard work to make all scientists in our team to use a version control system (even as simple as Mercurial). We don't have the time nor the energy to switch to another version control system. But we will, forced and obliged. I really don't want to check out Github or something else to migrate our projects there, but we will, forced and obliged.” Atlassian Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab take collective steps against the Git ransomware attack Attackers wiped many GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket repos with ‘compromised’ valid credentials leaving behind a ransom note BitBucket goes down for over an hour

Inspired by Mozilla’s anti-tracking policy, Apple has announced its intention to implement the WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy into Safari, the details of which it shared last week. This policy outlines the types of tracking techniques that will be prevented in WebKit to ensure user privacy. The anti-tracking mitigations listed in this policy will be applied “universally to all websites, or based on algorithmic, on-device classification.” https://twitter.com/webkit/status/1161782001839607809 Web tracking is the collection of user data over multiple web pages and websites, which can be linked to individual users via a unique user identifier. All your previous interactions with any website could be recorded and recalled with the help of a tracking system like cookies. Among the data tracked include the things you have searched, the websites you visited, the things you have clicked on, the movements of your mouse around a web page, and more. Organizations and companies rely heavily on web tracking to gain insight into their user behavior and preferences. One of the main purposes of these insights is user profiling and targeted marketing. While this user tracking helps businesses, it can be pervasive and used for other sinister purposes. In the recent past, we have seen many companies including the big tech like Facebook and Google involved in several scandals related to violating user online privacy. For instance, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and Google’s cookie case. Apple aims to create “a healthy web ecosystem, with privacy by design” The WebKit Prevention Policy will prevent several tracking techniques including cross-site tracking, stateful tracking, covert stateful tracking, navigational tracking, fingerprinting, covert tracking, and other unknown techniques that do not fall under these categories. WebKit will limit the capability of using a tracking technique in case it is not possible to prevent it without any undue harm to the user. If this also does not help, users will be asked for their consent. Apple will treat any attempt to subvert the anti-tracking methods as a security vulnerability. “We treat circumvention of shipping anti-tracking measures with the same seriousness as an exploitation of security vulnerabilities,” Apple wrote. It warns to add more restrictions without prior notice against parties who attempt to circumvent the tracking prevention methods. Apple further mentioned that there won’t be any exception even if you have a valid use for a technique that is also used for tracking. The announcement reads, “But WebKit often has no technical means to distinguish valid uses from tracking, and doesn’t know what the parties involved will do with the collected data, either now or in the future.” WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy’s unintended impact With the implementation of this policy, Apple warns of certain unintended repercussions as well. Among the possibly affected features are funding websites using targeted or personalized advertising, federated login using a third-party login provider, fraud prevention, and more. In cases of tradeoffs, WebKit will prioritize user benefits over current website practices. Apple promises to limit this unintended impact and might update the tracking prevention methods to permit certain use cases. In the future, it will also come up with new web technologies that will allow these practices without comprising the user online privacy such as Storage Access API and Privacy-Preserving Ad Click Attribution. What users are saying about Apple’s anti-tracking policy A time when there is increasing concern regarding user online privacy, this policy comes as a blessing. Many users are appreciating this move, while some do fear that this will affect some of the user-friendly features. In an ongoing discussion on Hacker News, a user commented, “The fact that this makes behavioral targeting even harder makes me very happy.” Some others also believe that focusing on online tracking protection methods will give browsers an edge over Google’s Chrome. A user said, “One advantage of Google's dominance and their business model being so reliant on tracking, is that it's become the moat for its competitors: investing energy into tracking protection is a good way for them to gain a competitive advantage over Google, since it's a feature that Google will not be able to copy. So as long as Google's competitors remain in business, we'll probably at least have some alternatives that take privacy seriously.” When asked about the added restrictions that will be applied if a party is found circumventing tracking prevention, a member of the WebKit team commented, “We're willing to do specifically targeted mitigations, but only if we have to. So far, nearly everything we've done has been universal or algorithmic. The one exception I know of was to delete tracking data that had already been planted by known circumventors, at the same time as the mitigation to stop anyone else from using that particular hole (HTTPS supercookies).” Some users had questions about the features that will be impacted by the introduction of this policy. A user wrote, “While I like the sentiment, I hate that Safari drops cookies after a short period of non-use. I wind up having to re-login to sites constantly while Chrome does it automatically.” Another user added, “So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web? I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?” Read Apple’s official announcement, to know more about the WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy. Firefox Nightly now supports Encrypted Server Name Indication (ESNI) to prevent 3rd parties from tracking your browsing history All about Browser Fingerprinting, the privacy nightmare that keeps web developers awake at night Apple proposes a “privacy-focused” ad click attribution model for counting conversions without tracking users  

Google has introduced an extension of OpenCensus called the OpenCensus Web which is a library for collecting application performance and behavior monitoring data of web pages. This library focuses on the frontend web application code that executes in the browser allowing it to collect user-side performance data. It is still in alpha stage with the API subject to change. This is great news for websites that are heavy by nature, such as media-driven pages like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon, and WebApps. OpenCensus Web interacts with three application components, the Frontend web server, the Browser JS, and the OpenCensus Agent. The agent receives traces from the frontend web server proxy endpoint or directly from the browser JS, and exports them to a trace backend. Features of OpenCensus Web OpenCensus Web traces spans for initial load including server-side HTML rendering The OpenCensus Web spans also includes detailed annotations for DOM load events as well as network events It automatically traces all the click events as long as the click is done in a DOM element and it is not disabled OC Web traces route transitions between the different sections of your page by monkey-patching the History API It allows users to create custom spans for their web application for tasks or code involved in user interaction It performs automatic spans for HTTP requests and browser performance data OC web relates user interactions back to the initial page load tracing. Along with this release, the OpenCensus family of projects is merging with OpenTracing into OpenTelemetry. This means all of the OpenCensus community will be moving over to OpenTelemetry, Google and Omnition included. OpenCensus Web’s functionality will be migrated into OpenTelemetry JS once this project is ready. Omnition founder wrote on Hacker News, “Although Google will be heavily involved in both the client libraries and agent development, Omnition, Microsoft, and others will also be major contributors.” Another comment on Hacker News, explains the merger more in detail. “OpenCensus is a Google project to standardize metrics and distributed tracing. It's an API spec and libraries for various languages with varying backend support. OpenTracing is a CNCF project as an API for distributed tracing with a separate project called OpenMetrics for the metrics API. Neither include libraries and rely on the community to provide them.  The industry decided for once that we don't need all this competing work and is consolidating everything into OpenTelemetry that combines an API for tracing and metrics along with libraries. Logs (the 3rd part of observability) are in the planning phase.  OpenCensus Web is bringing the tracing/metrics part to your frontend JS so you can measure how your webapp works in addition to your backend apps and services.” By September 2019, OpenTelemetry plans to reach parity with existing projects for C#, Golang, Java, NodeJS, and Python. When each language reaches parity, the corresponding OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects will be sunset (old projects will be frozen, but the new project will continue to support existing instrumentation for two years, via a backwards compatibility bridge). Read more on the OpenTelemetry roadmap. Public reaction for OpenCensus Web has been positive. People have expressed their opinions on a Hacker News thread. “This is great, as the title says, this means that web applications can now have tracing across the whole stack, all within the same platform.” “I am also glad to know that the merge between OpenTracing and OpenCensus is still going well. I started adding telemetry to the projects I maintain in my current job and so far it has been very helpful to detect not only bottlenecks in the operations but also sudden spikes in the network traffic since we depend on so many 3rd-party web API that we have no control over. Thank you OpenCensus team for providing me with the tools to learn more.” For more information about OpenCensus Web, visit Google’s blog. CNCF Sandbox, the home for evolving cloud-native projects, accepts Google’s OpenMetrics Project Google open sources ClusterFuzz, a scalable fuzzing tool Google open sources its robots.txt parser to make Robots Exclusion Protocol an official internet standard

Every year a new edition of the ECMAScript (ES) scripting-language specification standard comes out. This year it is its tenth edition, also known as ES2019 or ES10. The feature set of ES2019 got finalized earlier this year and was published last month. Some of the exciting features this specification brings are Object.fromEntries(), trimStart(), trimEnd(), flat(), flatMap(), description property for symbol objects, optional catch binding, and more. These features have also landed in the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome for developers to try out. Let’s take a look at some of the features in ES2019: Object.fromEntries() In JavaScript, you can easily convert objects into arrays with the Object.entries() method that was introduced in the ES2017 standard. ES2019 introduces the Object.fromEntries() method that enables you to do exactly the opposite. Similar to the dict() function in Python, this method allows you to transform a list of key-value pairs into an object. Array.prototype.flat() and Array.prototype.flatMap() The method Array.prototype.flatten() was renamed to Array.prototype.flat() method in ES2019 after last year it ended up breaking MooTools' implementation of it. It recursively flattens an array up to the specified depth, which defaults to 1. The second method, ‘Array.prototype.flatMap’ performs the mapping of each element and then flattens the result into a new array. trimStart() and trimEnd() The purpose of the new trimStart() and trimEnd() methods proposed in ES2019 is same as the trimLeft() and trimRight() methods. While trimStart() is used to remove whitespace from the beginning of a string, trimEnd() is used to remove whitespace characters from the end of a string. These are introduced to maintain consistency with the padStart/padEnd the standard functions. To maintain web compatibility trimLeft() and trimRight() will be their aliases. Optional catch binding In JavaScript, it is mandatory to specify the catch() parameter when using try...catch, no matter whether you use it or not. However, there are a few use cases where you wouldn’t want to use the parameter or catch binding. Axel Rauschmayer, the author of JavaScript for impatient programmers (ES1–ES2019), lists the following two: If you want to completely ignore the error. You don’t care about the error or you already know what it will be, but you do want to react to it. This new proposal allows you to completely omit the unused catch binding without any syntax errors. Function.toString() Earlier, when you called the toString() method on a function it used to strip all the whitespaces, newlines, and comments from the source code. Now, it will return the function source code exactly as it was defined. Description property for Symbol objects ES2019 introduces a new read-only ‘description’ property for Symbol objects. You can add it to a Symbol object to return a string containing its description for debugging purposes. Well-formed JSON.stringify() According to a JSON RFC, JSON text when shared “outside the scope of a closed ecosystem” should be encoded using UTF-8. However, JSON.Stringify() can sometimes return strings and code points, particularly, the surrogate range (U+D800—U+DFFF), that cannot be represented in UTF-8. This ES2019 proposal prevents JSON.stringify() from returning such ill-formed Unicode strings. Many developers are excited about these new ES2019 proposals. A user on Hacker News commented, “That array.flat() and array.flatMap() stuff is great to see. Always having to rely on lodash and friends to do that type of work. Exciting to see how JS is evolving.” Another user added, “Object.fromEntries will be super useful, surprised it’s taken this long to become a native feature.” Others are waiting for the pattern matching and optional chaining proposals to reach the stage 4 of TC39 process, “Now if we could just get pattern matching and optional chaining, that would really elevate things.” These were some of the features introduced in ES2019. To know more, check out the specification published on the ECMA International website. Introducing QuickJS, a small and easily embeddable JavaScript engine Firefox 67 will come with faster and reliable JavaScript debugging tools Introducing Node.js 12 with V8 JavaScript engine, improved worker threads, and much more  

Laracon US 2019, probably the biggest Laravel conference, wrapped up yesterday. Its creator, Tylor Otwell kick-started the event by talking about the next major release, Laravel 6. He also showcased a project that he has been working on called Laravel Vapor, a full-featured serverless management and deployment dashboard for PHP/Laravel. https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/1154168986180997125 This was a two-day event from July 24-25 hosted at Time Square, NYC. The event brings together people passionate about creating applications with Laravel, the open-source PHP web framework. Many exciting talks were hosted at this game-themed event. Evan You, the creator of Vue, was there presenting what’s coming in Vue.js 3.0. Caleb Porzio, a developer at Tighten Co., showcased a Laravel framework named Livewire that enables you to build dynamic user interfaces with vanilla PHP.  Keith Damiani, a Principal Programmer at Tighten, talked about graph database use cases. You can watch this highlights video compiled by Romega Digital to get a quick overview of the event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si8fHDPYFCo&feature=youtu.be Laravel 6 coming next month Since its birth, Laravel has followed a custom versioning system. It has been on 5.x release version for the past four years now. The team has now decided to switch to semantic versioning system. The framework currently stands at version 5.8, and instead of calling the new release 5.9 the team has decided to go with Laravel 6, which is scheduled for the next month. Otwell emphasized that they have decided to make this change to bring more consistency in the ecosystem as all optional Laravel components such as Cashier, Dusk, Valet, Socialite use semantic versioning. This does not mean that there will be any “paradigm shift” and developers have to rewrite their stuff. “This does mean that any breaking change would necessitate a new version which means that the next version will be 7.0,” he added. With the new version comes new branding Laravel gets a fresh look with every major release ranging from updated logos to a redesigned website. Initially, this was a volunteer effort with different people pitching in to help give Laravel a fresh look. Now that Laravel has got some substantial backing, Otwell has worked with Focus Lab, one of the top digital design agencies in the US. They have together come up with a new logo and a brand new website. The website looks easy to navigate and also provides improved documentation to give developers a good reading experience. Source: Laravel Laravel Vapor, a robust serverless deployment platform for Laravel After giving a brief on version 6 and the updated branding, Otwell showcased his new project named Laravel Vapor. Currently, developers use Forge for provisioning and deploying their PHP applications on DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, and more. It provides painless Virtual Private Server (VPS) management. It is best suited for medium and small projects and performs well with basic load balancing. However, it does lack a few features that could have been helpful for building bigger projects such as autoscaling. Also, developers have to worry about updating their operating systems and PHP versions. To address these limitations, Otwell created this deployment platform. Here are some of the advantages Laravel Vapor comes with: Better scalability: Otwell’s demo showed that it can handle over half a million requests with an average response time of 12 ms. Facilitates collaboration: Vapor is built around teams. You can create as many teams as you require by just paying for one single plan. Fine-grained control: It gives you fine-grained control over what each team member can do. You can set what all they can do across all the resources Vapor manages. A “vanity URL” for different environments: Vapor gives you a staging domain, which you can access with what Otwell calls a “vanity URL.” It enables you to immediately access your applications with “a nice domain that you can share with your coworkers until you are ready to assign a custom domain,“ says Otwell. Environment metrics: Vapor provides many environment metrics that give you an overview of an application environment. These metrics include how many HTTP requests have the application got in the last 24 hours, how many CLI invocations, what’s the average duration of those things, how much these cost on lambda, and more. Logs: You can review and search your recent logs right from the Vapor UI. It also auto-updates when any new entry comes in the log. Databases: With Vapor, you can provision two types of databases: fixed-sized database and serverless database. The fixed-sized database is the one where you have to pick its specifications like VCPU, RAM, etc. In the serverless one, however, if you do not select these specifications and it will automatically scale according to the demand. Caches: You can create Redis clusters right from the Vapor UI with as many nodes as you want. It supports the creation and management of elastic Redis cache clusters, which can be scaled without experiencing any downtime. You can attach them to any of the team’s projects and use them with multiple projects at the same time. To watch the entire demonstration by Otwell check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsPeWjKAUt0&feature=youtu.be Laravel 5.7 released with support for email verification, improved console testing Building a Web Service with Laravel 5 Symfony leaves PHP-FIG, the framework interoperability group

Last year, Andrew Godwin, a Django contributor, formulated a roadmap to bring async functionality into Django. After a lot of discussion and amendments, the Django Technical Board approved his DEP 0009: Async-capable Django yesterday. Godwin wrote in a Google group, “After a long and involved vote, I can announce that the Technical Board has voted in favour of DEP 0009 (Async Django), and so the DEP has been moved to the "accepted" state.” The reason why Godwin thinks that this is the right time to bring async-native support in Django is that starting from version 2.1, it supports Python 3.5 and up. These Python versions have async def and similar native support for coroutines. Also, the web is now slowly shifting to use cases that prefer high concurrency workloads and large parallelizable queries. The motivation behind Async in Django The Django Enhancement Proposal (DEP) 0009 aims to address one of the core flaws in Python: inefficient threading. Python is not considered to be a perfect asynchronous language. Its ‘asyncio’ library for writing concurrent code suffers from some core design flaws. There are alternative async frameworks for Python but are incompatible. Django Channels brought some async support to Django but they primarily focus on WebSocket handling. Explaining the motivation, the DEP says, “At the same time, it's important we have a plan that delivers our users immediate benefits, rather than attempting to write a whole new Django-size framework that is natively asynchronous from the start.” Additionally, most developers are unacquainted with developing Python applications that have async support. There is also a lack of proper documentation, tutorials, and tooling to help them. Godwin believes that Django can become a “good catalyst” to help in creating guidance documentation. Goals this DEP outlines to achieve The DEP proposes to bring support for asynchronous Python into Django while maintaining synchronous Python support as well in a backward-compatible way. Here are its end goals, that Godwin listed in his roadmap: Making the blocking parts in Django such as sessions, auth, the ORM, and handlers asynchronous natively with a synchronous wrapper exposed on top where needed to ensure backward compatibility. Keeping familiar models/views/templates/middleware layout intact with very few changes. Ensuring that these updates do not compromise speed and cause significant performance regressions at any stage of this plan. Enabling developers to write fully-async websites if they want to, but not enforcing this as the default way of writing websites. Welcoming new talent into the Djang team to help out on large-scale features. Timeline to achieve these goals Godwin in his "A Django Async Roadmap" shared the following timeline: Django Version Updates 2.1 Current in-progress release. No async work 2.2 Initial work to add async ORM and view capability, but everything defaults to sync by default, and async support is mostly threadpool-based. 3.0 Rewrite the internal request handling stack to be entirely asynchronous, add async middleware, forms, caching, sessions, auth. Start the deprecation process for any APIs that are becoming async-only. 3.1 Continue improving async support, potential async templating changes 3.2 Finish deprecation process and have a mostly-async Django. Godwin posted a summary of the discussion he had with the Django Technical Board in the Google Group. Some of the queries they raised were how the team plans to distinguish async versions of functions/method from sync ones, how this implementation will ensure that there is no performance hit if the user opts out of async mode, and more. In addition to these technical queries, the board also raised a non-technical concern, “The Django project has lost many contributors over the years, is essentially in a maintenance mode, and we likely do not have the people to staff a project like this.” Godwin sees a massive opportunity to lurking in this fundamental challenge - namely to revive the Django project. He adds, “I agree with the observation that things have substantially slowed down, but I personally believe that a project like async is exactly what Django needs to get going again. There's now a large amount of fertile ground to change and update things that aren't just fixing five-year-old bugs.” Read the DEP 0009: Async-capable Django to know more in detail. Which Python framework is best for building RESTful APIs? Django or Flask? Django 2.2 is now out with classes for custom database constraints  

On Thursday, The Register reported that Laurie Voss, the co-founder and chief data officer of JavaScript package registry, NPM Inc left the company. Voss’s last day in office was 1st July while he officially announced the news on Thursday. Voss joined NPM in January 2014 and decided to leave the company in early May this year. NPM has faced its share of unrest in the company in the past few months. In the month of March  5 NPM employees were fired from the company in an unprofessional and unethical way. Later 3 of those employees were revealed to have been involved in unionization and filed complaints against NPM Inc with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).  Earlier this month NPM Inc at the third trial settled the labor claims brought by these three former staffers through the NLRB. Voss’ s resignation will be third in line after Rebecca Turner, former core contributor who resigned in March and Kat Marchan, former CLI and community architect who resigned from NPM early this month. Voss writes on his blog, “I joined npm in January of 2014 as co-founder, when it was just some ideals and a handful of servers that were down as often as they were up. In the following five and a half years Registry traffic has grown over 26,000%, and worldwide users from about 1 million back then to more than 11 million today. One of our goals when founding npm Inc. was to make it possible for the Registry to run forever, and I believe we have achieved that goal. While I am parting ways with npm, I look forward to seeing my friends and colleagues continue to grow and change the JavaScript ecosystem for the better.” Voss also told The Register that he supported unions, “As far as the labor dispute goes, I will say that I have always supported unions, I think they're great, and at no point in my time at NPM did anybody come to me proposing a union,” he said. “If they had, I would have been in favor of it. The whole thing was a total surprise to me.” The Register team spoke to one of the former staffers of NPM and they said employees tend not to talk to management in the fear of retaliation and Voss seemed uncomfortable to defend the company’s recent actions and felt powerless to affect change. In his post Voss is optimistic about NPM’s business areas, he says, “Our paid products, npm Orgs and npm Enterprise, have tens of thousands of happy users and the revenue from those sustains our core operations.” However, Business Insider reports that a recent NPM Inc funding round of the company raised only enough to continue operating until early 2020. https://twitter.com/coderbyheart/status/1152453087745007616 A big question on everyone’s mind currently is the stability of the public Node JS Registry. Most users in the JavaScript community do not have a fallback in place. While the community see Voss’s resignation with appreciation for his accomplishments, some are disappointed that he could not raise his voice against these odds and had to quit. "Nobody outside of the company, and not everyone within it, fully understands how much Laurie was the brains and the conscience of NPM," Jonathan Cowperthwait, former VP of marketing at NPM Inc, told The Register. CJ Silverio, a principal engineer at Eaze who served as NPM Inc's CTO said that it’s good that Voss is out but she wasn't sure whether his absence would matter much to the day-to-day operations of NPM Inc. Silverio was fired from NPM Inc late last year shortly after CEO Bryan Bogensberger’s arrival. “Bogensberger marginalized him almost immediately to get him out of the way, so the company itself probably won’t notice the departure," she said. "What should affect fundraising is the massive brain drain the company has experienced, with the entire CLI team now gone, and the registry team steadily departing. At some point they’ll have lost enough institutional knowledge quickly enough that even good new hires will struggle to figure out how to cope." Silverio also mentions that she had heard rumors of eliminating the public registry while only continuing with their paid enterprise service, which will be like killing their own competitive advantage. She says if the public registry disappears there are alternative projects like the one spearheaded by Silverio and a fellow developer Chris Dickinson, Entropic. Entropic is available under an open source Apache 2.0 license, Silverio says "You can depend on packages from any other Entropic instance, and your home instance will mirror all your dependencies for you so you remain self-sufficient." She added that the software will mirror any packages installed by a legacy package manager, which is to say npm. As a result, the more developers use Entropic, the less they'll need NPM Inc's platform to provide a list of available packages. Voss feels the scale of npm is 3x bigger than any other registry and boasts of an extremely fast growth rate i.e approx 8% month on month. "Creating a company to manage an open source commons creates some tensions and challenges is not a perfect solution, but it is better than any other solution I can think of, and none of the alternatives proposed have struck me as better or even close to equally good." he said. With  NPM Inc. sustainability at stake, the JavaScript community on Hacker News discussed alternatives in case the public registry comes to an end. One of the comments read, “If it's true that they want to kill the public registry, that means I may need to seriously investigate Entropic as an alternative. I almost feel like migrating away from the normal registry is an ethical issue now. What percentage of popular packages are available in Entropic? If someone else's repo is not in there, can I add it for them?” Another user responds, “The github registry may be another reasonable alternative... not to mention linking git hashes directly, but that has other issues.” Other than Entropic another alternative discussed is nixfromnpm, it is a tool in which you can translate NPM packages to Nix expression. nixfromnpm is developed by Allen Nelson and two other contributors from Chicago. Surprise NPM layoffs raise questions about the company culture Is the Npm 6.9.1 bug a symptom of the organization’s cultural problems? Npm Inc, after a third try, settles former employee claims, who were fired for being pro-union, The Register reports

What does the phrase "a manager" really mean anyway? This phrase means different things to different people and is often overused for the position which nearly matches an analyst-level profile! This term, although common, is worth defining what it really means, especially in the context of software development. This article is an excerpt from the book The Successful Software Manager written by an internationally experienced IT manager, Herman Fung. This book is a comprehensive and practical guide to managing software developers, software customers, and explores the process of deciding what software needs to be built, not how to build it. In this article, we’ll look into aspects you must be aware of before making the move to become a manager in the software industry. A simple distinction I once used to illustrate the difference between an analyst and a manager is that while an analyst identifies, collects, and analyzes information, a manager uses this analysis and makes decisions, or more accurately, is responsible and accountable for the decisions they make. The structure of software companies is now enormously diverse and varies a lot from one to another, which has an obvious impact on how the manager’s role and their responsibilities are defined, which will be unique to each company. Even within the same company, it's subject to change from time to time, as the company itself changes. Broadly speaking, a manager within software development can be classified into three categories, as we will now discuss: Team Leader/Manager This role is often a lead developer who also doubles up as the team spokesperson and single point of contact. They'll typically be the most senior and knowledgeable member of a small group of developers, who work on the same project, product, and technology. There is often a direct link between each developer in the team and their code, which means the team manager has a direct responsibility to ensure the product as a whole works. Usually, the team manager is also asked to fulfill the people management duties, such as performance reviews and appraisals, and day-to-day HR responsibilities. Development/Delivery Manager This person could be either a techie or a non-techie. They will have a good understanding of the requirements, design, code, and end product. They will manage running workshops and huddles to facilitate better overall team working and delivery. This role may include setting up visual aids, such as team/project charts or boards. In a matrix management model, where developers and other experts are temporarily asked to work in project teams, the development manager will not be responsible for HR and people management duties. Project Manager This person is most probably a non-techie, but there are exceptions, and this could be a distinct advantage on certain projects. Most importantly, a project manager will be process-focused and output-driven and will focus on distributing tasks to individuals. They are not expected to jump in to solve technical problems, but they are responsible for ensuring that the proper resources are available, while managing expectations. Specifically, they take part in managing the project budget, timeline, and risks. They should also be aware of the political landscape and management agenda within the organization to be able to navigate through them. The project manager ensures the project follows the required methodology or process framework mandated by the Project Management Office (PMO). They will not have people-management responsibilities for project team members. Agile practitioner As with all roles in today's world of tech, these categories will vary and overlap. They can even be held by the same person, which is becoming an increasingly common trait. They are also constantly evolving, which exemplifies the need to learn and grow continually, regardless of your role or position. If you are a true Agile practitioner, you may have issues in choosing these generalized categories, (Team Leader, Development Manager and Project Manager)  and you'd be right to do so! These categories are most applicable to an organization that practises the traditional Waterfall model. Without diving into the everlasting Waterfall vs Agile debate, let's just say that these are the categories that transcend any methodologies. Even if they're not referred to by these names, they are the roles that need to be performed, to varying degrees, at various times. For completeness, it is worth noting one role specific to Agile, that is being a scrum master. Scrum master A scrum master is a role often compared – rightly or wrongly – with that of the project manager. The key difference is that their focus is on facilitation and coaching, instead of organizing and control. This difference is as much of a mindset as it is a strict practice, and is often referred to as being attributes of Servant Leadership. I believe a good scrum master will show traits of a good project manager at various times, and vice versa. This is especially true in ensuring that there is clear communication at all times and the team stays focused on delivering together. Yet, as we look back at all these roles, it's worth remembering that with the advent of new disciplines such as big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, there are new categories and opportunities to move from a developer role into a management position, for example, as an algorithm manager or data manager. Transitioning, growing, progressing, or simply changing from a developer to a manager is a wonderfully rewarding journey that is unique to everyone. After clarifying what being a “modern manager" really means, and the broad categories applicable in software development (Team / Development / Project / Agile), the overarching and often key consideration for developers is whether it means they will be managing people and writing less code. In this article, we looked into different leadership roles that are available for developers for their career progression plan. Develop crucial skills to enhance your performance and advance your career with The Successful Software Manager written by Herman Fung. “Developers don’t belong on a pedestal, they’re doing a job like everyone else” – April Wensel on toxic tech culture and Compassionate Coding [Interview] Curl’s lead developer announces Google’s “plan to reimplement curl in Libcrurl” ‘I code in my dreams too’, say developers in Jetbrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2019 Survey

The internet was ablaze when Evan You, creator of Vue, published an RFC to introduce a function-based component API earlier this month. This followed a huge discussion in the Vue community on whether such an API is really needed. https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1137567675356291072 This proposal came after Evan You previewed an experimental Hooks API back in November at Vue Conf Toronto 2018. Why Vue needs a function-based component API Components help you to abstract your code into smaller pieces. This gives your web applications a better structure, makes the code more readable and understandable and most importantly enables you to reuse logic across multiple components. According to the RFC, the components API in Vue 2.x has some drawbacks in terms of reusability. The three common patterns that are generally used to achieve reusability in Vue are mixins, high-order components, and renderless components. Each of these come with their share of drawbacks: Mixins bring implicit dependencies in code, causes name clashes, and make your code harder to understand. HOCs can often be verbose, involve lots of passing props and hoisting statics, and can cause name conflicts. Renderless components require extra stateful component instances that come at the cost of performance. This function-based component API aims to address all these drawbacks. Inspired by React Hooks, its objective is to provide developers a “clean and flexible way” to compose logic and share it between components. The team plans to achieve this by moving the logic code to a "composition function" and returning reactive state. Another motivation behind this proposed change is to provide better built-in TypeScript type inference support as function-based APIs are naturally type-friendly. Also, code written with function-based APIs compresses better than an object or class-based code. What Vue developers think about this RFC? The Vue community was a little taken aback with this proposal that will essentially change the way they used to write Vue. They were concerned that this will take away the most desirable property of Vue, which is its simplicity. Vue’s class-based API made it easy to understand and get started with. However, bringing function-based API to Vue will complex things in exchange for very fewer advantages. Some argued that this change will make it another React. “Like a lot of others here, I chose Vue vs React for the simplicity and readability of code. The class-based API was easy to understand and pick up. If I wanted React, I would have just chosen React from the beginning. I get that there are some technical advantages to doing this, but Vue 3 is starting to really turn me off of staying with Vue going forward,” a developer shared on a Reddit thread. Developers were concerned that the time they have invested in learning Vue will go to waste as everything is about to change. A Vue developer commented on Reddit, “You learn to do something one way and then they change it up on you. Might as well just switch to react at this point.” Many compared this scenario to that of Angular 1->2 or Python 2->3 and suggested switching to Svelte to avoid the mess. Some, however, liked the syntax and are looking forward to playing around with the API.  A developer shared, “But I read through, checked out the new (simpler) example, read Evan's arguments about logical task grouping, and on a second read with a more open mind, I actually kind of like the new syntax and am now looking forward to trying it out. I'm glad they agreed to keep the object syntax around though.” How the Vue team responded When the RFC was first published it implied that the current API will be deprecated in a future major release. Also, there was a lot of confusion around the "compatibility" and "stable" build.  Many developers felt that this RFC is already “set in stone” from the way it was communicated. They felt that the core team has already decided to bring this API to Vue without community consultation. So, one of the reasons behind this confusion was how the change was communicated. The team acknowledged this and asked for suggestions from the community to improve their communication. https://twitter.com/N_Tepluhina/status/1142715703558103040 The core team clarified that the update will be additive and the team has no plans to remove the Object API in a future major release. Evan You, the creator of Vue, said in a thread, “feel free to stay with the current API for as long as you wish. As long as the community feels there's a need for the old API to stay, it will stay. The only one that can make the decision to switch to the new API is yourself.” He also addressed the concerns on a Hacker News thread: There is a lot of FUD in this thread so we need to clarify a bit: - This API is purely additive to 2.x and doesn't break anything. - 3.0 will have a standard build which adds this API on top of 2.x API, and an opt-in "lean build" which drops a number of 2.x APIs for a smaller and faster runtime. - This is an open RFC, which means it's not set in stone. The whole point of having an RFC is so that users can voice their opinions. It's not like we are shipping this tomorrow. After listening to various perspectives shared by developers, the core team revised the RFC accordingly putting everybody finally at ease. Guillaume Chau, a member of the Vue core team, put out a clear and concise plan of action on Twitter to which people are responding positively. This plan reassured that the Object API will not be deprecated until the community stops using it and the proposed API will be first offered as a standalone plugin for Vue 2.x. https://twitter.com/Akryum/status/1143114880960126976 Some developers have also started to try out the new API: https://twitter.com/igor_randj/status/1143302939496370177 https://twitter.com/cmsalvado/status/1143230023089786880 Closing thoughts Open source programmers put their time and efforts in building software that helps the community and an RFC (request for comments) is a way for the community to get involved in building high quality software at scale. Through RFC you can share your constructive feedback on why a change is necessary or is not necessary. And, all this can be done in a respectful way. This showed us a very good example of how an RFC should really work. Publishing an RFC, discussing with the community, listening to the community, and deciding collectively what to do next. Despite some hiccups in communication, the Vue core team did a good job in engaging with the community to develop the roadmap for the function-based component API in Vue. Read the RFC for function-based component API for more details. Vue 2.6 is now out with a new unified syntax for slots, and more Learning Vue in 2019 with Anthony Gore’s developer knowledge map Evan You shares Vue 3.0 updates at VueConf Toronto 2018

Last month, This Dot Labs, a framework-agnostic JavaScript consultancy, conducted its biannual online live streaming event, This.JavaScript - State of Browsers. In this live stream, representatives of popular browsers talk about the amazing features users can look forward to, next releases, and much more. This time Firefox was missing. However, in attendance were: Stephanie Drescher ,  Program Manager, Microsoft Edge Brian Kardell ,  Developer Advocate, Igalia, an active contributor to WebKit Rijubrata Bhaumik , Software Engineer, Intel, who talked about Intel’s contribution towards web Jonathan Sampson ,  Developer Relations, Brave Paul Kinlan , Sr. Developer Advocate, Google Diego Gonzalez, Product Manager, Samsung Internet The event was moderated by Tracy Lee , who is the  founder of This Dot Labs. Following are some of the updates shared by the browser representatives: What’s new with Edge In December last year, Microsoft announced that it will be adopting Chromium in the development of Microsoft Edge for desktop. And, beginning this year we saw its decision coming to fruition. The tech giant made the first preview builds of the Chromium-based Edge available to both macOS and Windows 10 users. These preview builds are available for testing from the Microsoft Edge Insider site. This Chromium-powered Edge is available for iOS and Android users too. Stephanie Drescher shared what has changed for the Edge team after switching to Chromium. This is enabling them to deliver and update the Edge browser across all supported versions of Windows. This is also allowing them to update the browser more frequently as they are no longer tied to the operating system. The Edge team is not just using Chromium but also contributing all the web platform enhancements back to Chromium by default. The team has already made 400+ commits into the Chromium project. Edge comes with support for cross-platform and installable progressive web apps directly from the browser. The team’s next focus area is to improve Windows experience in terms of accessibility, localization, scrolling, and touch. At Build 2019, Microsoft also announced its new WebView that will be available for Win32 and UWP apps. She said this “will give you the option of an evergreen Chromium platform via edge or the option to bring your own version for AppCompat via a model that's similar to Electron.” Moving on to dev tools, the browser has several new dev tools that are visually aligned with VS Code. The updates in dev tools include dark mode on by default, control inputs, and the team is further exploring “more ways to align the experience between your browser dev tools and VS Code.” The browser’s built-in tools can now inspect and debug any Microsoft-Edge powered web content including PWAs, WebView, etc. No doubt these are some amazing features to be excited for. Edge has come to iOS and macOS, however, the question of whether it will support Linux in the future remains unanswered. Drescher said that the team has no plans right now to support Linux, however looking at the number of user requests for Linux support they are starting to think about it. What’s new with Chrome At I/O 2019, Google shared its vision for Chrome, which is making it "instant, powerful, and safe" to help improve the overall browsing experience. To make Chrome faster and lighter, a bunch of improvements to V8, Chrome’s JavaScript engine has been made. Now, JavaScript memory usage is down by 20% for real-world apps. After addressing the startup bottlenecks, Chrome's loading speed has now become 50% better on low-end devices and 10 percent across devices. The scrolling performance has also improved by 18%. Along with these speed gains, the team has also introduced a few features in the web platform that aim to take the burden away from the developers: The lazy loading mechanism reduces the initial payload to improve load time. You just need to add “loading=lazy" in the image or iframe elements. The idea is simple, the web browser will not download an image or iframe that has the loading attribute until the user scrolls near to it. The Portals API, first showcased at I/O this year, aims to make navigation between sites and web pages smoother. Portals is very similar to iframe in that it allows web developers to embed remote content in their pages. The difference is that with Portals you will able to navigate inside the content you are embedding. As a part of making Chrome more powerful, Google is actively working on bridging the capabilities gap between native and web under Project Fugu. It has already introduced two APIs: Web Share and Web Share Target and plans to bring more capabilities like writable file API, event alarms, user idle detection, and more. As the name suggests, the Web Share API allows websites to invoke the native sharing capabilities of the host platform. Users will be able to easily share either a URL or text on pretty much any platform they want to. Till date, we were restricted to share content on native apps that have registered as a share target. With Web Share Target API, installed web apps can also register with the underlying OS as a target to receive shared content. Talking about the safety aspect, Chrome now comes with support for WebAuthn, a new authentication standard by W3C, starting from its 67 version. This API allows servers to integrate strong authenticators that are built into devices, for instance, Windows Hello or Apple’s Touch ID. What's new with Brave Edge, Chrome, and Brave share one common thing and that is they all are Chromium-based. But, what sets Brave apart is the Basic Attention Token (BAT). Jonathan Sampson, who was representing Brave, said that we have seen a “Cambrian Explosion” of cryptocurrencies utility tokens or blockchain assets like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Etherium. Partnership with Coinbase Previously, if we wanted to acquire these assets there was only one way to do it “mining”, which meant a huge investment on expensive GPUs and power bill. Brave believes that the next step to earn these assets is primarily by your “attention”. Brave’s goal is to take users from mining to earning blockchain assets. As a part of this goal, it has partnered with Coinbase, one of the prominent companies in the blockchain space. Users will get 10 dollars in the form of BAT just for learning the state of digital advertising and what Brave and attention tokens are doing in that space. Through BAT, Brave is providing its consumers with a direct way to support their content creators. These content creators can customize and personalize this entire experience by navigating to the signing up on Brave’s creators page. Implementation changes in how BAT is sent to creators The Brave team has also made some implementation changes in terms of how this whole thing works. Previously, consumers could send these tokens to anyone. The token then used to go into an omnibus settlement wallet and stays there until that creator verifies with the program and demonstrates ownership over their web property. Finally, after all this, they get access to these tokens for use. Unfortunately, this could mean that some tokens have to “sit in a state of limbo” for an indefinite amount of time. Now, the team has re-engineered this process to hold these tokens inside your wallet for up to 90 days. If and when that property is verified the tokens are transmitted out. And, if the property is never verified then the tokens are released back inside your wallet. You can send them to another creator instead of letting them sit in that omnibus settlement wallet. Sampson further added, “of course the entire process goes through the anonymize protocol so that brave nor anybody else has any idea which websites you're visiting or to whom you are contributing support.” Inner working of Brave ads To better the ads recommendation Brave comes with a machine learning model integrated. This feature is opt-in so the user gets to decide when and how many ads they want to see in order to earn BAT from their attention. The ML model can study the user and learn about them each day. Every day a catalog is downloaded to each users’ device. Then the individual machines would churn away on that catalog to figure out which ads are relevant to an individual. Once, the relevant ads are found out users will see a small operating system notification. Brave sends 70% of the revenue made from the users’ attention to the user in the form of BAT. Brave Sync (Beta) The beta version of Brave Sync is available across platforms from Windows, macOS, Linux to Android, and iOS. Similar to Brave Ads, this is also an opt-in feature that allows you to automatically sync browsing data across devices. Right now it is in beta and supports syncing only bookmarks. In the future releases, we can expect support for tabs, history, passwords, autofill, as well as Brave Rewards. Once you enable it on one device, you just need to scan a QR code or enter a secret phrase to register another device for syncing. Canary builds available Like all the other browsers, Brave has also started to share their nightly and dev builds to give developers an “earlier insight” into the work they are doing. You can access them through their download page. These were some of the major updates discussed in the live stream. There was also Intel and Samsung who talked about their contributions to the web. Igalia’s developer Brian Kardell talked about the dark mode, pointer events, and more in WebKit. Watch the full event on YouTube for more details. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olSQai4EUD8 Elvis Pranskevichus on limitations in SQL and how EdgeQL can help Microsoft makes the first preview builds of Chromium-based Edge available for testing Brave introduces Brave Ads that share 70% revenue with users for viewing ads

At the ongoing Shopify Unite 2019 conference, Shopify has announced a number of new products like Fulfillment network, video and 3D model assets, custom storefront tools, new online store design experience and others. Most of these products will be launched later this year. Here are the major highlights: Shopify Fulfillment Network Shopify Fulfillment Network, will be a dispersed network of fulfillment centers which uses machine learning to automatically select the optimal inventory quantities per location, as well as the closest fulfillment option for each of the customers’ shipments. Once available, it will be possible to simply install the app, select the products, get a quote, and begin selling the products. Entrepreneurs will be able to provide fast, low-cost delivery to their customers while maintaining ownership of customer data and a branded shipping experience. A single back office A merchants order, inventory, and customer data will stay synced and up-to-date across all warehouse locations and channels. Recommended warehouse locations To save costs on shipping, it will be possible to find the best locations, based on where the sales are coming from. Low stock alerts When inventory runs low, merchants will know when to replenish to continue meeting demands. 99.5% order accuracy The correct package will be chosen and out the door on time, with good accuracy. Hands-on warehouse help A dedicated account manager will assist the merchant in finding the best path, to reach their customers so the costs can be kept low. Shopify Fulfillment Network is currently available in the United States, and interested merchants can apply for early access. https://twitter.com/treklightgear/status/1141406217815724034 Native support to video and 3D model assets Shopify’s product will natively support video and 3D model assets, thus adding a new dimension to products and providing a richer purchase experience for customers. This feature is expected to be released later this year. Manage media through a single location It will now be possible to upload, access, and store video and 3D models from the same place where the images are being managed currently. Deploy through the new Shopify video player Users can use, one of the 10 starter themes, to easily display video 3D models using the new Shopify player for video or the viewer for Shopify AR. New editor apps Shopify is inviting partners and developers to create additional apps and custom integrations to open up new ways, to create and modify images, videos, and AR experiences. https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/1141456478496161797 https://twitter.com/thewakdesigns/status/1141607172670926848 New Online Store Design Experience The new online store design will provide entrepreneurs, with more options for customization. This will give them more control over the layout and aesthetic of their store. This feature is expected to be released later this year. Easier customization at the page and store level Any page can now be customized by using sections, just like the homepage. It is also now possible for users to save time by setting content on multiple pages, using master pages. Portable content that moves with you From now on, users will not have to make a duplicate of their theme or move content over manually. The shop’s content will follow the owner so that they are able to make changes, like downloading a new version or trying out a new one. A new workspace to update your store It will now be possible to edit and preview updates before publishing. Any minor tweak or major changes can be done in a new space to draft changes. Custom storefront tools Shopify’s Storefront API allows customers to use the custom storefront tools to free their storefront from certain back-end dependencies. This gives customers the flexibility to sell anywhere and in any way they want. This feature is more exciting for more complex or niche businesses that use the web, mobile, gaming, and other interactive mediums as storefronts to reach their customers. Shopify merchants have already started to use the Storefront API’s. For example, NTWRK hosted a live stream shopping show using Shopify’s Storefront API. Connect microservices to create personalized experiences Third-party shipping services can be used for blogs, storefront, and product pages or accurate shipment alerts Turn the world into your storefront Entrepreneurs can engage with their customers through vending machines, live streams, smart mirrors, voice shopping, and more. Speedy and scalable to have development teams work in parallel The flexible architecture will enable the development teams to create the experiences and storefronts, according to their vision. Interested merchants can create custom experiences on the customer storefront tools website. https://twitter.com/CarloTeran/status/1141475420904157185 Customer loyalty with retail shoppers With the new Shopify Point of Sale cart app extensions, users can apply and edit loyalty and promotional details directly from the customer cart. Apply discounts lightning-quick The number of clicks needed to apply a discount has been reduced to one, thus saving users 10 seconds for each sale on average. Important information at your fingertips Key customer details, from birthdays to reward milestones will surface automatically and in-context, so the merchants or their staff won’t have to navigate to the apps to get alerts. More flexibility Shopify’s app partners will give merchants the flexibility to pick a program that works best for their customer experience, like rewarding a long-time customer, online or in-store. Interested merchants can learn more about the apps on the POS Loyalty and Promotion Apps website. https://twitter.com/ShawnBouchard/status/1141483355252199425 Shopify Payments in multiple currencies and languages From this year onwards, merchants can run their business in their own preferred language. Shopify is already available in French, German, Japanese, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish. Additionally, Shopify will be available in 11 additional languages like Dutch, Simplified Chinese, and more. Also, Shopify Payments will enable selling in multiple currencies and will be globally available to all Shopify merchants later this year. The displayed prices will use simple rounding rules and automatically adjust based on current foreign -exchange rates. Soon shoppers will be able to convert between nine major currencies -GBP, AUD, CAD, EUR, HKD, JPY, NZD, SGD, and USD, thus using their preferred way to pay. https://twitter.com/anthonycook/status/1141392464818900996 Users of Shopify are obviously quite elated with all the announcements. People also touted this as Shopify’s way to combat Amazon, its main competitor in the market. https://twitter.com/tomfgoodwin/status/1141434508257964032 Visit the Shopify blog, for more details. Read More Why Retailers need to prioritize eCommerce Automation in 2019 5 things to consider when developing an eCommerce website Through the customer’s eyes: 4 ways Artificial Intelligence is transforming ecommerce

Angular 8.0 was released yesterday as a major version of the popular framework for building web, mobile, and desktop applications. This release spans across the framework, Angular Material, and the CLI.  Angular 8.0 improves application startup time on modern browsers, provides new APIs for tapping into the CLI, and aligns Angular to the ecosystem and more web standards. The team behind Angular has released a new Deprecation Guide. Public APIs will now support features for N+2 releases. This means that a feature that is deprecated in 8.1 will keep working in the following two major releases (9 and 10). The team will continue to maintain Semantic Versioning and a high degree of stability even across major versions. Angular 8.0 comes with Differential Loading by Default Differential loading is a process by which the browser chooses between modern or legacy JavaScript based on its own capabilities. The CLI looks at the target JS level in a user’s tsconfig.json form ng-update to determine whether or not to take advantage of Differential Loading. When target is set to es2015, CLI generates and label two bundles. At runtime, the browser uses attributes on the script tag to load the right bundle. <script type="module" src="…"> for Modern JS <script nomodule src="…"> for Legacy JS Angular’s Route Configurations now use Dynamic Imports Previously, lazily loading parts of an application using the router was accomplished by using the loadChildren key in the route configuration. The previous syntax was custom to Angular and built into its toolchain. With version 8, it is migrated to the industry standard dynamic imports. {path: `/admin`, loadChildren: () => import(`./admin/admin.module`).then(m => m.AdminModule)} This will improve the support from editors like VSCode and WebStorm who will now be able to understand and validate these imports. Angular 8.0 CLI updates Workspace APIs in the CLI Previously developers using Schematics had to manually open and modify their angular.json to make changes to the workspace configuration. Angular 8.0 has a new Workspace API to make it easier to read and modify this file. The workspaces API provides an abstraction of the underlying storage format of the workspace and provides support for both reading and writing. Currently, the only supported format is the JSON-based format used by the Angular CLI. New Builder APIs to run build and deployment processes Angular 8.0 has new builder APIs in the CLI that allows developers to tap into ng build, ng test, and ng run to perform processes like build and deployment. There is also an update to AngularFire, which adds a deploy command, making build and deployment to Firebase easier than ever. ng add @angular/fire ng run my-app:deploy Once installed, this deployment command will both build and deploy an application in the way recommended by AngularFire. Support for Web Worker Web workers speed up an application for cpu-intensive processing. Web workers allow developers to offload work to a background thread, such as image or video manipulation. With Angular 8.0, developers can now generate new web workers from the CLI. To add a worker to a project, run: ng generate webWorker my-worker Once added, web worker can be used normally in an application, and the CLI will be able to bundle and code split it correctly. const worker = new Worker(`./my-worker.worker`, { type: `module` }); AngularJS Improvements Unified Angular location service In AngularJS, the $location service handles all routing configuration and navigation, encoding, and decoding of URLS, redirects, and interactions with browser APIs. Angular uses its own underlying Location service for all of these tasks. Angular 8.0 now provides a LocationUpgradeModule that enables a unified location service that shifts responsibilities from the AngularJS $location service to the Angular Location Service. This should improve the lives of applications using ngUpgrade who need routing in both the AngularJS and Angular part of their application. Improvements to lazy load Angular JS As of Angular version 8, lazy loading code can be accomplished simply by using the dynamic import syntax import('...'). The team behind Angular have documented best practices around lazy loading parts of your AngularJS application from Angular, making it easier to migrate the most commonly used features first, and only loading AngularJS for a subset of your application. These are a select few updates. More information on the Angular Blog. 5 useful Visual Studio Code extensions for Angular developers Ionic Framework 4.0 has just been released, now backed by Web Components, not Angular The Angular 7.2.1 CLI release fixes a webpack-dev-server vulnerability