Tech News - Application Development

Apache foundation announced the RC release of NetBeans 9.0. They also announced the feature set and tools applicable for Java development, including Java Swing, JavaFX, and the support created specifically for Java 9. Apache in its release note mentioned that the focus for this release is mainly on: IP clearance of the Oracle code donation Support for the latest Java SE versions - Java 9 and Java 10 The following are some of the most important features that will be the part of NetBeans 9.0 release: Supporting Local Variable Type Inference: The type inference associated with local variables is used by JDK for definition inside methods, initialization blocks, for-loops, and other blocks like if-else. Supporting the Jigsaw Module System: The Jigsaw module system was announced under Project Jigsaw with a primary goal of making the development easy for large applications that include calling a lot of libraries. It was implemented to maintain libraries, secure and maintain the Java SE platform, and scale the performance of JDK based on the size of the applications. NetBeans 9.0 will be supporting the modules system for Project Jigsaw. New Java Modular Application project type: The modularity feature is considered to be one of the most emerging technology features introduced in Java 9. It helps developers to build productive and easily maintainable software that uses Java, especially for enterprise applications. NetBeans 9.0 will see the full support for modularity. Java Shell support: Java Shell (jShell) is a command line introduced in Java 9 to help write smaller programs efficiently without the hassles of declarations, creating classes, etc. NetBeans 9.0 provides integrated console-like UI for the Java Shell and hence making the development, a bit more hassle-free. You can read more about the known issues in the RC release on the confluence page. The source and binaries for NetBeans 9.0 RC1 can be downloaded from Apache’s mirrors. What can you expect from the upcoming Java 11 JDK? Forget C and Java. Learn Kotlin: the next universal programming language

Qt 5.11 has been released ahead of the planned schedule. Qt is one of the most popular cross-platform software development framework for embedded and desktop applications. It holds a variety of new features and bug fixes. Qt for Web assembly and Python Qt for Web assembly version 1 has been released to allow users to target the web and browsers as a platform for Qt applications. In addition, Qt is actively working on supporting Qt on Python and the first release is planned for June. Qt Core and Network Both the Qt Core and item model have received a couple of updates. Most importantly, Qt Core now has Unicode support. So, QChar, QString, QTextBoundaryFinder and Qt algorithm for bidirectional text are now fully compatible with Unicode 10. In the Qt network, ALPN and HTTP/2 are now supported on iOS. Qt GUI and Widgets Accessibility support on Windows is now based on Microsoft UI automation. Widget styles on Windows are also updated to better support High-DPI displays. Qt widgets have received support for quick text selection by mouse in QLineEdit, along with a number of bug-fixes. The print dialog on Linux now also features much better support for all the CUPS provided options. Qt QML Engine The Qt QML compiler pipeline is completely re-written with major improvements in performance and maintainability. This pipeline always compiles QML to a platform-independent bytecode. You can also generate the bytecode ahead of time, using the qmlcompiler feature. The new bytecode interpreter has vastly improved and reaches 80-90% of the performance of the JIT in Qt 5.10. Qt Quick Qt Quick, now supports loading compressed textures in the image element. As this feature stores images in a format that is directly digestible by the GPU, it reduces application startup time and memory consumption. Qt Quick also supports both .ktx and .pkm container file formats. Qt Location Qt Location now includes experimental support for turn-by-turn navigation. It also has an experimental API to create map objects that are not bound to QQuickItems. In MapPolyline objects,  layers are now working in combination with Map items. Routing and Places API are extensible and there is a newly added element, known as WayPoint. Qt 3D and Qt 3D Studio Qt 3D Studio 2.0 is currently in beta and the complete release will soon be available with a fully rewritten runtime, that’ll be based on top of Qt 3D. With this work, Qt 3D has also received numerous new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. Qt Webengine The Chromium version underneath Qt Webengine has been updated to Chromium 65. In addition, Qt now supports embedded DevTools without requiring the use of a separate browser, an installable cookie filter and quota permissions. Other items qdoc now uses libclang to parse C++ giving a much better support for modern C++ in the documentation. Qt Serialbus and Bluetooth have now improved support for CAN bus and BTLE. To read the complete coverage, visit the release notes page. Qt 5.11 free version will be supported for one year. For longer support periods, developers should prefer Qt 5.9 which will be supported until June 2020.  An extended lifetime support can be purchased from the Qt Company if required. The next release, Qt 5.12 is planned for November and will be a long-term supported release. How to create multithreaded applications in Qt How to Debug an application using Qt Creator 3 ways to deploy a QT and OpenCV application

GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a popular Open source compiler system from the GNU Project. Recently the GNU Project announced the release of GCC 8.1 with added features for its support for languages like C, C++, Java, ADA, GO, Objective-C, among others. This release is the first stable release for GCC v8 with a lot of improvements over previous standards. This release brings an enhancement in C++ support and debugging for various languages. GNU has significantly improved the implementation of Go language to run smoothly with the latest version of Go i.e. v1.10. Apart from the compiler improvement, there has been an addition of garbage collector feature for Golang. GNU has also worked on one of the leading features of GCC compiler: Profile-driven optimization. This feature enables fail-safe compiling using several iterations of compiling and generating a profile of the runtime behavior. Based on the behavior of the program, GCC optimizes the compilation of the program. With the new improvement, GCC can detect code that is not compiled properly and can trigger the code in next instances. Some of the features that were worked on this release include the following: Improvement in compiler diagnostics enhancing the error and warning information at compile time Better Link-time optimization (LTO) using a new Dwarf format debug information. The libstdc++ library feature from C++17 and C++ 2a libraries C language extensions that support automatic vectorization for the latest AMD processors. One of the most important features to note is the support for C++ 20 (C++ 2a) which is currently under development. Also the support for the newer ARM CPUs, Intel CPUs, AMD HSA, among others is worth noting in this release. For more information about changes in GCC 8.1, you can see the changelog. Also, this release is available from GNU FTP servers. More news in application development: What’s new in Visual Studio 1.22 What is Mob Programming?

Slack: productivity and collaboration tool, or platform for procrastination, in-jokes and GIFs? We couldn't possibly say here at Packt. For most of us, the only thing worse than wasting time on Slack is looking like you're never on Slack at all. While you'd like to tell people it's because you're busy, you can see your colleagues eyeing you with suspicion, convinced that if you're not procrastinating in the same manner they are, you really can't be doing anything at all. Luckily, someone has invented a tool for dealing with exactly this problem.  Take a bow Will Leinweber (@leinweber) - you have made something to make us look busy. Or, at the very least thoughtful and ready to contribute to the channel chat at any moment. https://twitter.com/leinweber/status/989267343002951680 Will has put the project on GitHub. You can find it here. The only disappointment with the tool is that Will didn't include the additional feature that  "asks other people what their typing whenever they're typing." The results were pretty hilarious, and likely too distracting for anyone to do any work at all... https://twitter.com/leinweber/status/989285775165423616 Needless to say, there was a pretty strong reaction to Will's program. https://twitter.com/snail_5/status/989271471766757376 https://twitter.com/LittleMxSurly/status/989315676325085184 https://twitter.com/CodeTheWebBlog/status/990008655394189313 https://twitter.com/shandrew/status/989395097249693698 Truly, software is being used for incredible things in 2018. These are the projects we need if we're to survive a hostile and unforgiving future, forever typing into the abyss at each other, and doomed to search out reaction GIFs to every rude email and hostile expression someone sends your way. What other novelty software projects have you seen recently? Let us know in the comments, and we'll do some investigative work* *Have a look on Twitter. Read more Creating slash commands for Slack using Bottle

Salesforce has welcomed spring with their new Salesforce Spring 2018 release. With this release, Salesforce users, admins, and developers can try out some fresh features and tools to enhance, tweak, and guide the processes that govern our Salesforce instances. This release brings in exciting enhancements to the Lightning Platform and advanced developments in artificial intelligence. Without further ado, let’s have a quick look at some of the noteworthy features that are really going to change the way you work with Salesforce. Create personalized navigation in Lightning Experience This new Lightning Experience feature in Salesforce allows one to reorder items, rename, or remove the added items. The navigation bar now contains more than just object-level items. One can add granular items, like a dashboard, list, or record, and so on. Build Interactive Salesforce Surveys Creating beautiful, easy-to-use forms for collecting feedback and data from users or customers is now easy. All survey data is stored in your org which is nothing but an entity that contains users, data, and automation corresponding to an individual organization. This unified data storage is helpful especially in creating reports, dashboards and sharing insights within your organization. Customize your Org to match your brand using themes The ability to customise the look and feel of Salesforce has never really been available. With Spring ’18, create up to 300 custom themes or clone the built-in themes provided by Salesforce with just a few clicks. Easy calculation of Opportunity Scoring using Einstein One can prioritize their way to more business with Einstein Opportunity Scoring. Einstein Opportunity Scoring generates opportunity scores based on the record details, history and related activities of the opportunity and related account. Information about the opportunity owner, such as yearly win rates, is also used to calculate the score. Stay on Top of Duplicate Records by Using Duplicate Jobs Duplicates are a pain for most organisations. With the relatively recent release of duplicate and matching rules in Salesforce, creating duplicate jobs with standard or custom matching rules to scan Salesforce business or person accounts, contacts or leads for duplicates has become easy. Job results can be shared with others and information about the duplicate jobs are logged. These logs helps you in tracking your progress in reducing the number of duplicate records in Salesforce org. Easy storage of Data Privacy Preferences Data privacy records, based on the Individual object, lets one store certain data privacy preferences for their customers. These records can help honor and respect customers’ wishes when they request only specific forms of contact from one’s company. Some laws and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), can require you to honor your customers’ wishes. See More Relevant Objects First in Top Results Top Results list the most relevant results for most frequently used objects. The improved ordering of objects means less scrolling and clicking around to reach the object one wants. To know more about these and other releases in detail, visit the Salesforce Blog. Read More Implementing Automation Process with Salesforce CRM Build a custom Admin Home page in Salesforce CRM Lightning Experience Getting Started with Salesforce Lightning Experience

ReSharper is one of the leading productivity tools from JetBrains. It is integrated with Visual Studio and provides enhancement and automation for .NET project development. JetBrains announced the general availability of ReSharper 2018.1, making it the first important release for this year. One of the major improvement speculated was the support for C# 7.2. JetBrains have finalized the support by adding all the entities that are specifically part of C# 7.2. This will ensure that the code written with latest C# modifiers and operators does not throw an error in ReSharper. Additionally, there are significant bug fixes made to this release. One of the improvements that Jetbrains highlighted in the release, is the Navigation. ReSharper 2018.1 has tools to better filter the search string and provide a better overview of the members of the code. Major additions in ReSharper Ultimate: Debug Step Filters in ReSharper C++ helps you in search related to functions while debugging. Include Analyzer helps with managing dependencies in the header files while compilation. Easy navigation with Analysis Subject panel in dotMemory 2018.1. The redesigned continuous testing mode in dotCover 2018.1 can be made to run in the existing unit test session instead of running another continuous test session. Console runner redesigned for dotCover 2018.1 helps giving coverage analysis for web applications running on IIS server. Code formatting engine has been improved to avoid problems related to indenting, line breaks, spaces, etc. Code formatting problems can be rectified in the code editor itself. Update in managing StyleCop rules directly from StyleCop configuration files. StyleCop analyzes the C# code for style and consistency throughout the development. This update will enhance consistency in code styling for C# developers. Other handy features to make developer's life simple are: Pre-/Post- build support for ReSharper Build engine A new option, known as Remember last search for navigation New settings for parentheses in function declaration and wrapping LINQ expressions ReSharper 2018.1 redefines the code navigation and enhances development with C# 7.x version. Also, improvements in unit testing in ReSharper will certainly catch attention for this release. Latest ReSharper Ultimate 2018.1 is available for download from the official JetBrains website.  

Red has been around for a while now and has been extending its purpose from systems programming to various fields like Blockchain, Android development, among others. Recently, Red introduced some modern implementation support for Android programming. The way Red can be used in Android programming is using a specific bridge, that allows the Red code to call the whole Android API in Java. This allows you to write Android applications in Red language without having to write any Java code. Red, in its latest release, has introduced a new and improved Java bridge for Android. Java bridge was first introduced in Red's version 0.3. With this bridge, the Red programs are able to interface Java Virtual Machine through JNI (Java Native Interface). The new Java bridge now replaces the old implementation and is now optimized for efficient bindings of Red programs to the Android API in Java. This optimization greatly improves the performance of the Android application. To explain this, Red has published a short overview of Red/View backend on Android, the source code for which can be found on this GitHub repo. Red his also been working on implementing several features in its v0.7 release. The community has released a short list of features on its site, though all the work on these features is done in a private repository. The private repo will be opened to selected developers soon for testing and fine-tuning. Some of the features that are set to come in the new release are as follows: Full set of Red/View widgets support Draw & Shape dialects full support Compatibility with Android GUI themes Device-independent coordinate system Updated APK building toolchain for targeting API 23+ Android systems Improved ARM backend, support for ARMv7+ Android support Red has also released a roadmap for the upcoming releases which shows that v0.7 is going to be an important milestone for Android development with Red. Apart from the work in Android, Red has been concentrating on the Blockchain-related wave of tasks, Full I/O, among other high-priority milestones. As of now, Red v0.6.4 has been released on the GitHub repository. The community is still considering a 0.6.5 release, to insert a small extra milestone before going into the 0.7 release. Build your first Android app with Kotlin Why are Android developers switching from Java to Kotlin?

Microsoft has released the latest version of Visual Studio 1.22 recently with a few additions and improvements to it. The primary feature that Microsoft has introduced is called “Logpoints”. The idea of Logpoints is very literal - i.e. these are the breakpoints while debugging code and while taking note of these breakpoints, the developers need not stop code execution and can keep a track of events. The primary changes are: Syntax Aware code folding: This feature allows better code folding for CSS, HTML, JSON and Markdown files. This feature ensures that the code folding is not based on indentation but based on code syntax and hence makes the code much more readable and developer friendly. Conversion to ES6 Refactoring: How many times have you thought that a little bit of help while coding would have made your coding experience better? Visual Studio has added this feature in their new release. The code suggest button (an elliptical hover button) will suggest latest ES 6 code snippets and the developers will have the choice to accept it or modify it. A welcome feature for the new and mid-level programmers for sure. Auto Attach to process: This feature provides a lot of help for the Node.js developers. It automatically starts debugging node.js programs and applications the moment you launch them, eliminating the need for a dedicated launcher program. The other important features of the new version are: Cross file error, warning and reference navigation: This helps you to navigate through the different workspaces efficiently. Improved Large File support: This enables faster syntax highlighting and helps in better and larger memory allocation for bigger applications making the overall debugging process faster. Multi-Line links in the terminal: This feature allows developers to hyperlink multiple links spanning across several lines in the editor. Better organization of JavaScript/TypeScript imports: This feature helps programmers to remove unused codes and sort their imports in a more orderly manner. Emmet Wrap preview: This feature provides the live preview for Emmet's wrap with abbreviation functionality. With these new and exciting features, Visual Studio surely is moving towards a more user-friendly and predictive coding platform for the programmers. We will keep a close watch on its future release and share updates on how these releases target better code reusability, importing different codes easily and better-debugging functionality. Read about the full update on the official Visual Studio website. C++, SFML, Visual Studio, and Starting the first game  

There has been some exciting news from OpenCV: OpenCV developer Vadim Pisarevsky announced the development on OpenCV 4 on the GitHub repository of OpenCV and addressed why the time is right for the release of OpenCV 4. OpenCV 3 was released in 2015 taking 6 years to come out after OpenCV 2 which was released in 2009. OpenCV 3 has been built around C++ 98 standards. Re-writing the library in the recent version of C++ like C++ 11 or later versions would mean to break the "binary compatibility". This makes it important to move further from the OpenCV 3 promises. There are two interesting concepts that we need to know here - Binary compatibility and source-level compatibility. OpenCV had made a promise to stay binary-compatible with versions, that means the release of new OpenCV versions will stay compatible with the previous version library calls. Now moving from C++ 98 standard to recent C++ standard will break this promise. However, OpenCV has looked into this and found that not much harm will be caused by this migration, hence relaxing the "binary compatibility" and moving to "source compatibility" with the new release. Apart from migrating to latest C++ standards, the OpenCV library needs refactoring and new module additions for Deep learning and neural networks seeing the heavy usage of OpenCV in machine learning. OpenCV developers can expect some big revisions in functions and modules. Here is a quick summary of what you might expect in this major release of OpenCV 4.0: Hardware-accelerated Video I/O module: This module maximizes OpenCV performance using software and hardware accelerator in the machine. This means calling this module with OpenCV 4 will harness the acceleration. HighGUI module (Revised): With the enhancement of this module, you can efficiently read video from camera or files and also perform a write operation on them. This module comes with a lot of functionality for media IO operation. Graph API module: This module creates support for efficiently reading and writing graphs from the image. Point Cloud module: Point cloud module contains algorithms such as feature estimation, model fitting, and segmentation. These algorithms can be used for filtering noisy data, stitch 3D point clouds, segment part of the image, among others. Tracking, Calibration, and Stereo Modules, among other features that will benefit image processing with OpenCV. You can find the full list of a new module that might get added in OpenCV 4 in the issues page of OpenCV repo. The OpenCV community is relying on its huge developer community to facilitate closing the open issues within the speculated time of release, that is July 2018. Functionalities that don’t make it OpenCV 4 release, will be rolled into the OpenCV 4.x releases. While you wait for OpenCV 4, enjoy these OpenCV 3 tutorials: New functionality in OpenCV 3.0 Fingerprint detection using OpenCV 3 OpenCV Primer: What can you do with Computer Vision and how to get started? Image filtering techniques in OpenCV Building a classification system with logistic regression in OpenCV Exploring Structure from Motion Using OpenCV