Tech News - Web Development

Starting from this month Google App Engine will allow web developers to deploy Node.js web applications to its standard environment. The App Engine standard environment is nothing but container instances running on Google's infrastructure. These containers previously supported runtimes in Java 7, Java 8, Python 2.7, Go and PHP. Node.js 8 is the new addition to this long list of environments. Developers who always wanted a ready and quick platform to build web applications on Cloud scale with a very low cost to start or wanted to get rid of the burden of managing and provisioning infrastructure have found that Google App Engine is a very good choice. It has been a developer’s favorite due to its zero-config deployments, zero server management, and auto-scaling capabilities. This move from Google brings in numerous advantages such as fast deployments and automatic scaling, better developing experience, and reliable security features. Fast Deployment and Automatic scaling The app Engine standard environment is known for it’s shorter deployment time. A basic Express.js application can be deployed under a minute with the standard environment. Not only that but App Engine allows the apps to automatically scale based on the incoming traffic to that application. For example, App Engine automatically scales to zero when there is no request made for that particular application. This allows developers to implement cost-effective measures while developing or deploying their applications. Enhanced Developer Experience Google has always been striving to provide a smoother developer experience with all its products. That’s also true for this new improvement to the App Engine. The new Node.js runtime comes with no language or API restrictions. This allows developers to choose npm modules of their choice. Along with this, App Engine also provides application logs and key performance indicators in Stackdriver, which takes care of Monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for applications on the Google Cloud Platform. Reliable Security: Updating the operating system or Node.js for any major or minor versions is a tedious task. App Engine takes care of all this by automatically handling all the updates required for your application to work smoothly with all the latest features. Not only that but App Engine’s automated one-click certificate generation allows developers to serve their application under a secure HTTPS URL with their own custom domain. The relationship between Node.js and Google goes a long way beyond GCP as Node.js runs on V8, Google's open source high-performance JavaScript engine. This recent collaboration between Node.js and Google also comes with better crafted node.js libraries that allow developers to use GCP products within their node.js applications. To try out all these new features on the App Engine you can visit their official website. Building chat application with Kotlin using Node.js, the powerful Server-side JavaScript platform Node 10.0.0 released, packed with exciting new features How to deploy a Node.js application to the web using Heroku

Masonite, the popular Python web development framework, has released a new version. Masonite 2.0 comes with several new features to Masonite including new status codes, database seeding, built in cron scheduling, controller constructor resolving, speed improvements and much more. A new ‘Tinker’ Command Masonite 2.0 adds a new Tinker command that starts a Python shell and imports the container. It works as a great debugging tool and can be used for verifying that objects are loaded into the container correctly. A new Task Scheduler Masonite 2.0 adds a task scheduler,  a new default package that allows scheduling recurring tasks. You can read about the Masonite Scheduler under the Task Scheduling documentation. Automatic Server Reloading A huge update to Masonite is the new --reload flag on the serve command. Now the server will automatically restart when it detects a file change. You can use the -r flag as a shorthand. Autoloading With the new autoloading feature, you can list directories in the AUTOLOAD constant in the config/application.py file and it will automatically load all classes into the container. Autoloading is great for loading command and models into the container when the server starts up. Database Seeding Support Masonite 2.0 adds the ability to seed the database with dummy data. Seeding the database helps in populating the database with data that would be needed for future development. Explicitly Imported Providers Providers are now explicitly imported at the top of the file and added to the PROVIDERS list, located in config/providers.py. This completely removes the need for string providers and boosts the performance of the application substantially. Status Code Provider Masonite 2 removes the bland error codes such as 404 and 500 errors and replaces them with a cleaner view. It also allows adding of custom error pages. Upgrading from Masonite 1.6 to Masonite 2.0 Masonite 1.6 to Masonite 2.0 has quite a large number of changes and updates in a single release. However, upgrading takes only around 30 mins for an average sized project. Read the Masonite upgrade guide for a step-by-step guide to upgrading. You can read the release notes, for the full list of features. Python web development: Django vs Flask in 2018 What the Python Software Foundation & Jetbrains 2017 Python Developer Survey had to reveal Should you move to Python 3? 7 Python experts’ opinions

Google's App Maker, has come out of its private preview mode and is now generally available. App Maker is an online tool for building and deploying business apps on the web. The company has remained quiet about its development ever since the launch one and a half years ago. However, now seeing the surge in making everything open source, App Maker remains open and free for all developers who want to give it a shot. App Maker is available to all G Suite Business and Enterprise customers, as well as G Suite for Education customers. If App Maker isn’t yet enabled for your eligible domain, you can turn it on in the Apps > Additional Google services section of the Admin console. The newly designed App Maker also has multiple features added to its basket. Most prominently, it now offers built-in support for Cloud SQL bringing high performance, scalability, and convenience. It has a Bring Your Own Database (BYODB) model, letting you connect it to the database of your choice using JDBC or a REST API. The new Google App Maker is fast and highly automated for app designing and development with Responsive templates, samples, a drag-and-drop UI design and declarative data modeling. It can be easily connected with data and services such as Gmail, Calendar, or Sheets. You can also use Apps Script to access over 40 Google services, Google Cloud Platform and other third-party services that support JDBC and REST. In fact, G Suite administrators will have complete visibility over the apps running in their organization. They can now view owners, usage metrics, and OAuth permissions. For example, you can view the activity of users using the Drive audit logs, or view the activity of end users in the OAuth Token audit logs. Administrators will also be able to prevent apps from running without their approval with expanded OAuth Whitelisting controls. You can read the details on Google Blog. For more information on App Maker, check out the Help Center. Google’s translation tool is now offline – and more powerful than ever thanks to AI Top reasons to use Google Lighthouse 3.0 Google Kubernetes Engine 1.10 is now generally available and ready for enterprise use

Meteor 1.7 released to support both modern as well as legacy browsers that will keep themselves updated as and when new features arrive. It also provides options for developers to selectively compile their node-modules before publishing it on npm. When Meteor was initially released in 2012, it was considered as a game-changing framework for developers to use JavaScript on the client as well as on the server-side. This gave birth to the “Isomorphic” revolution that allows developers to break from the shackles of rendering pages on the server-side. Over the years Meteor has followed an incremental update plan without drastically changing the framework, a move which developers have really appreciated, and the trend follows for the 1.7 release as well. Notable features in Meteor 1.7 Differential modern/legacy browser support When a new version for a browser is shipped, it comes with all the latest features of ECMAScript packed inside it. This has a very significant impact on web development as developers can start using the latest standards to ease the process and write more fluid and performant code. But it is not always possible, using these new features means leaving behind the users who are still using the old browser, posing a dilemma for developers. Well, Meteor 1.7 brings the best of both worlds by automatically building two sets of client-side assets, one tailored to the capabilities of the modern browser, and the other designed to work equally well on all supported browsers. This will help legacy browsers continue to work exactly the same as they were before. Selective compilation of node modules The npm packages are precompiled before they are published, so users of these packages have to settle for the compilation strategy decided by the author. Meteor 1.7, allows you to control how an npm package is compiled, or compile the package for modern/legacy browsers and Node. This lets application developers take complete control of the npm modules they are using. Most of the new features in Meteor 1.7 can be applied in a backward compatible manner or they can be opted out, it is completely a developer’s choice. For a complete breakdown of the new Meteor features, refer to this Official Meteor blog page.  

If you create web applications as a profession then you would be definitely needing an auditing tool to check what works and what doesn’t in your app. Google Lighthouse is one such tool. It saves a lot of time for you to assess your website’s performance and make it better. You can simply put any URL into Google Lighthouse, (with proper permissions of course) and it will audit it for performance issues and will create a separate report for each issue with ways to rectify it. You can use Lighthouse from the chrome dev tools or you can use it with npn tools as well. Google has announced the release of Lighthouse version 3 in the latest Google I/O conference. The new features of Lighthouse are mentioned below: Lighthouse 3 comes equipped with a new audit engine called Lantern. This helps in improved audits and also minimizes the variance between different audits. The reason for improved audits is that Lantern runs the audits in the same CPU and network environments and simulates the app performance in a regular environment. Lighthouse comes now with a new and improved UI that helps developers to better understand the issues related to their apps and take actionable insights from it. Image Courtesy: Google Uniformity of operation: Both the CLI based version as well as the Node.js version have the same set of controls so that it’s easier to use and less confusing for different sets of developers. Lighthouse has changed their scoring model which now considers 50 out of 100 score as 75 percentile. They have made it systematically harder to achieve the perfect score making the testing and auditing process much more stringent. 4 new audit types have been introduced. The first shows the time to load the first image or text, the second shows the validity of the robots.txt file. The third test shows ways to change videos to gifs and still preserve the video tag to improve the load time. The fourth test enables links to preload before the website loads. The final report is now distributed into three parts to facilitate the developer’s understanding of the scenario and improve the performance. These are the 1hr report which reports the results of the audit, the artifacts property report which includes the data collected from Chrome, and the final report includes the formatted report HTML/JSON/CSV as a string. Will these changes impact the way you develop your apps and make them fare better in the crowd? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section. Top 5 Google I/O 2018 conference Day 1 Highlights What can Google Duplex do for businesses? Google announces Chrome 67 packed with powerful APIs, password-free logins, PWA support, and more

Microsoft has acquired GitHub in a major deal worth $7.5 billion. Not only has this put the open source community in a frenzy, but has also opened up different options for the developers and programmers who don’t want to share their project and code details with Microsoft. There is a history to this particular behavior of the open source community towards Microsoft. Firstly let’s reframe the question - what is the fear that’s causing the migration? Microsoft has this well known habit of acquiring promising open source projects and then slowly letting them die. They even had a name for the strategy: ‘Embrace, Extend, Extinguish’. That’s a key reason, open source developers dread Microsoft. The other factor for the fear is Microsoft’s history of using their patents to sue open source projects. These are some reasons the open source developers have traditionally avoided Microsoft and their products for a long time.   The other side of the argument is that Microsoft is not the same company as it used to be in terms of their approach to open source mainly due to the change in their leadership team. Their present focus has also shifted from operating systems to the cloud, building Azure solutions, and promoting office 365. They have recently open sourced their scripting language powershell in an attempt to lure the open source developers under the organizational umbrella. In lesser words, Microsoft is trying for an image makeover and their GitHub deal might be yet another attempt to give the open source developers a bigger umbrella and more resources to develop production ready applications.   Whatever’s the actual reason, it’s pretty clear what’s on Open Source developers’ minds. As per the latest tweet from GitLab, the rate of new repositories being added to GitLab has increased significantly since Monday - the 4th of June. The snapshot below shows the spike in posting new repositories in Gitlab.   The trends of both Github and Gitlab have also spiked since the buying out news broke and that clearly shows that there is a huge spike in chatter regarding this. GitLab itself had started pushing a trend called #movingtogitlab  and because of the incoming traffic reaching exceptionally high volume, their servers also crashed for a brief period of time. Gitlab had posted the video tutorial called “Migrating from GitHub to GitLab” on the 3rd of June which has already reached 22.5k views which clearly shows that there have been 20k people at least who have tried to export their GitHub project to GitLab. Having said that let’s take a look at the number of active users for both of these platforms. While GitHub has around 24 million active users, GitLab is at a mediocre 100k. So the exodus of a few thousand might not make a significant dent on GitHub’s user base.   On one hand, the markets have rejoiced over the news of the Microsoft acquisition of Github boosting Microsoft’s stock prices well above 101 USD. On the other hand, the overall feeling towards this acquisition has been quite pessimistic among the developer community to say the least. This deal still has to go through regular auditing to check whether the norms for standard acquisition were followed and other details. The completion of this deal will happen only around December 2018 and the question remains whether Microsoft will be getting the same GitHub that they bought and what will this deal mean for Gitlab. The question on everyone’s mind right now is will Microsoft act as Github’s owner or steward? Will GitHub become the de facto leader for code sharing and pioneer in open source development? Or will other tools like GitLab, Sourceforge, Bitbucket take advantage of the situation and come to the forefront? The most interesting and positive thing to emerge from this scenario would be if Microsoft itself comes across as a leader in open source projects which would mean more funds and resources for useful and viable tech research and development and probably a brighter future for the tech world. Microsoft is going to acquire GitHub 10 years of GitHub Is Comet the new Github for Artificial Intelligence?

A new version of Jest, the popular framework for testing React applications is now available. Jest is developed by Facebook and can be used for testing JavaScript functions, but is specifically aimed at React. Jest is a zero configuration testing platform with features such as snapshot testing, parallelized test runs, built-in code coverage reports, and instant feedback. Jest 23 features major updates. Here are the top ones. Babel and Webpack join the Jest community Webpack saw their total test suite time reduced 6x from over 13 minutes to 2 minutes 20 seconds, after converting from Mocha to Jest 23 Beta. Interactive Snapshot Mode The newly incorporated Interactive snapshot mode, is added as a default watch menu option. With this new mode, testers can browse through each failing snapshot in each failing suite, and review, update or skip each failed snapshots individually. Snapshot Property Matchers Jest now has Snapshot property matchers through which testers can pass properties to the snapshot matcher which specify the structure of the data instead of the specific values. These property matchers are then verified before serializing the matcher type to provide consistent snapshot results across multiple test runs. Jest Each Jest 23 features a new jest-each library inspired by mocha-each and Spock Data Tables. This library defines a table of test cases, and then runs a test for each row with the specified column values. Support is provided for both array types and template literals for all flavors of describe and test. Watch Mode Plugins The watch mode system now allows adding of custom plugins to watch mode. These watch mode plugins can hook into Jest events and provide custom menu options in the watch mode menu. Other changes include: Test descriptions and functions are a mandate. Jest 23 will fail tests that do not include both a function and a description. Undefined props from React snapshots are now removed. MapCoverage, jest.genMockFunction and jest.genMockFn are deprecated. Snapshot name (if provided) is now added to the snapshot failure message so it's easier to find the snapshot that's failing. Mock timestamps are replaced with invocationCallOrder since two or more mocks may often have the same timestamp, making it impossible to test the call order. Mock function call results are added to snapshots so that both the calls and the results of the invocation are tracked. For the complete list of changes and updates, see the changelog. Testing Single Page Applications (SPAs) using Vue.js developer tools What is React.js and how does it work? How to test node applications using Mocha framework

Angular started as a simple frontend library. Today it has transformed in a complete framework as simply ‘Angular’ with continuous version progression from 2 to the recent 6. This progression added some amazing features to Angular, making the overall development process easier. Angular 6, is the latest version, is packed with exciting new features for all of the Angular community. In this article we are going to cover some amazing features which are out with Angular 6. So let’s get started! Angular Elements Consider a search component that we would like to have for a specific Angular application. It can be visualized as follows. In above application the search component uses the input ‘bat’ to fetch the results on the basis of its text similarity. A class named `SearchComponent` must be working beneath the app. With the advent of Angular 6, we can wrap such Angular components into custom elements. Such elements are nothing but DOM elements; in our case a combination of textbox and divs with a composition of javascript function. These elements once segregated can be used independently irrespective of any other frontend libraries like react.js, view or simple jquery. The custom elements are a new way to set the component individually out of the ng framework and use it independently. Ivy: Support for new Angular engine version 6 onwards Angular 6 will introduce us (in the near future) to a new Ivy engine that contributes to great performance and the decrease in load time of an application. Here are some important features of Ivy you need to know. Shaking Tree It is an optimization step that makes sure that unused code is not present in your build bundle. The tree shaking compilation is often used while executing `ng build` command to generate the build. New to what is a build or a bundle? A build or a bundle is a ready-to-go-live set of files that needs to be deployed on the production environment. Let’s  say a frontend project will be needing the following files in a bundle : In your Angular project there might be a component included but is not required. Assume, it falls under a specific if-condition and is not at all executed. The normal dead code elimination tools using static analysis work by retaining the symbols/characters of the reference already present in the unbundled code. Hence the component that was conditionally not at all used, unfortunately remains inside the bundle. The new rendering mechanism Render 2 is built to solve such issues. Now we can specify configuration through instruction based rendering technique. This may include only things that are required which in turn minimizes the size of builds bundles to the great extent. The new Ivy engine seems cool! New cli commands With upgradation to Angular 6, the ng cli package provides two new commands. ng add As its name suggests, the ‘ng add’ command provides you the capability to add a new module/package to your current application. This may be rxjs, material UI libraries etc. Don’t get confused, it doesn’t install the package but simply adds one to your project whenever required. So if you are planning to add a third party library to your Angular app make sure you install it using npm, and then add it using ng add. The automatic addition of such modules helps reduce development time by avoiding errors while adding up a module. ng update The new Angular version 6 cli has the most awaited ‘ng update’ command. This command when run, yields a command line that provides a list of packages that need to be updated over time. In case they are already updated, the command just provides a confirmation that everything is in order. Upgrading to ng 6 A fresh Angular 6 installation is not a problem. You can always follow https://update.Angular.io/ for incorporating changes with respect to updates. Here are a few set of things to do if you are planning to upgrade in your current project. Node.js version 8.9+ Update your Angular configuration //Globally npm i -g @Angular/cli //locally npm i @Angular/cli Once the Angular cli has its latest code, the ng update command is available for use. So let us use it for updating the packages under Angular/cli as follows npm update @Angular/cli Update the Angular/core packages using ng update as follows ng update @Angular/core Angular has rxjs for handling asynchronousity in the application. This library also needs to be updated to rxjs 6. Here is the link for the detailed updation process Update Angular material library that provides beautiful UI components ng update @Angular/material Finally run `ng serve` and test the new setup Besides all the amazing features listed above, Angular 6 provides support to rxJS6, Typescript 2.7 with conditional type declarations and not to forget the service-workers package in Angular’s core. At the time of Angular 6 launch, there were small break points with respect to command line commands like ng updates which are fixed by now and stable. The Angular team is already working towards some more incredible features like new ng-compiler engine, @aiStore (an AI powered solutions store), @mine package for bitcoins and much more in Angular 7. Over the years, the Angular team has continued to provide dedicated support to evolve the project into one of the  best that technology has to offer. With such tenacity, looks like the whole Angular ecosystem is poised to scale even greater heights than before. I, for one, can’t wait to see what they do next in Angular! [author title="Author Bio"] Erina is an assistant professor in the computer science department of Thakur college, Mumbai. Her enthusiasm in web technologies inspires her to contribute to freelance JavaScript projects, especially on Node.js. Her research topics were SDN and IoT, which according to her create amazing solutions for various web technologies when used together. Nowadays, she focuses on blockchain and enjoys fiddling with its concepts in JavaScript.[/author] Why switch to Angular for web development – Interview with Minko Gechev ng-conf 2018 highlights, the popular angular conference Getting started with Angular CLI and build your first Angular Component

Google has launched Chrome 67 on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android devices packed with exciting new features. The release features two powerful APIs, password-free logins, PWA support on desktops and more.  Let’s have a look at the features in detailed. Progressive web apps now supported on Desktops Chrome 67 now supports Desktop based progressive web apps.  They run the same way as other apps, in an app window, without an address bar or tabs. Service workers run the PWA to ensure they are engaging, fast, and smooth. As a developer, there are only certain breakpoints to consider while running your PWA in chrome. Essentially the process of creating it remains the same. If your app meets the standard PWA criteria, Chrome will fire the beforeinstallprompt event, However,  it won’t automatically prompt the user.  Here are the steps you need to follow: Save the event. Then, add some UI—like an install app button—to the app to tell the user your app can be installed As the user clicks the button, you need to call prompt on the saved event. Chrome will then show the prompt to the user If users click add, Chrome will add the PWA to their shelf and launcher AR and VR support with WebXR Device API Chrome 67 offers a special WebXR Device API, to create augmented reality and virtual reality experiences on desktops and mobile devices. It will be used to create immersive experiences across multiple AR/VR devices,  sensors and head-mounted displays including Google Daydream View, Samsung Gear VR, and desktop-hosted headsets like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality Headsets. This API will be used to develop AR and VR games, 360-degree videos, and also be used for data visualization, home shopping, and displaying art. Generic Sensor API for accelerometer support Updating mobile experiences, Chrome 67 offers a new Generic Sensor API. Websites can access a mobile device’s accelerometer, gyroscope, orientation sensor, and motion sensor. The API consists of a base Sensor interface with a set of sensor classes built on top. The base interface simplifies the implementation and specification process for the sensor classes. The goal of the Generic Sensor API is to promote consistency across sensor APIs, enable advanced use cases, and increase the pace at which new sensors can be exposed to the Web. Password-free logins Chrome 67 supports password-free logins based on the Web Authentication standard. These standards can be incorporated into browsers and allow additional ways for users to securely sign into most sites. These include biometric information such as fingerprint, retina, or facial recognition from either smartphone or a USB key. Changes in dev tools There are also a number of changes and updates in DevTools in Chrome 67.  Some of these include: Users can now search across all network headers. There are new audits, desktop configuration options, and viewing traces. Incorporation of user Timing in the Performance tabs. JavaScript VM instances are now clearly listed in the Memory panel. The Network tab in the Sources panel has been renamed as the Page tab. Certificate transparency information is available in the Security panel. Site isolation features now appear in the Performance panel. Check out the Google developer blog for a full list of updates. Chrome 67 can be updated by either using the browser’s built-in updater or downloading it directly from google.com/chrome. Firefox 60 arrives with exciting updates for web developers: Quantum CSS engine, new Web APIs and more Top 5 Google I/O 2018 conference Day 1 Highlights: Android P, Android Things, ARCore, ML kit and Lighthouse What can Google Duplex do for businesses?

Oracle announced the much awaited Oracle Apex 18.1 today. Oracle Application Express is a free development tool by Oracle. It allows developers to create web-based applications quickly by using a web browser on an Oracle database. With Oracle Apex 18.1, Oracle provides easy integration of data from the REST services with data taken from the SQL queries within an Oracle database to build scalable applications. The new release also includes high-quality features for creating applications without the need of coding. Let’s have a look at some of the major features and improvements in Oracle Apex 18.1. Key features and updates Application features High-level application features such as access control, email reporting, feedback, activity reporting, dynamic user interface selection, etc, can be added to your app. An application can also be created with “cards” report interface, a timeline report as well as a dashboard. REST enabled SQL support Apex 18.1 allows you to build charts, calendars, reports, and trees. You can also invoke certain processes against Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) -provided REST Enabled SQL Services. There is no need for a database link to include data from other remote database objects within your APEX application. REST Enabled SQL gets it all done for you. Web Source Modules Different REST endpoints can be used to declaratively access data such as ordinary REST data feeds, REST services from Oracle REST data services as well as Oracle Cloud Applications REST services. It provides the ability to influence REST data sources results using industry standard SQL. REST Workshop Updates have been made to the REST workshop. Apart from helping with creating REST services against Oracle database objects, the new REST workshop comes with an added ability to generate Swagger documentation against REST definitions with just a button click. Application Builder Improvements Oracle Apex 18.1 allows developers to create components quickly as wizards are now streamlined with fewer steps and smarter defaults. Usability enhancements have been made to Page Designer. This includes advanced color palette and graphics on page elements as well as to Sticky Filter which improves developers’ productivity. Social Authentication Oracle APEX 18.1 comes with a native authentication scheme and social sign-in. It is possible for developers to create applications in APEX using authentication methods such as Oracle Identity Cloud Service, Facebook, Google, generic OAuth2  and generic OpenID Connect without coding. Charts Oracle JET 4.2 engine is a new feature to the APEX 18.1. It consists of updated charts as well as APIs. It also comes with different types of charts such as Box-Plot, Gantt, and Pyramid. These provide support for multi-series sparse data sets. Mobile UI New component types namely ListView, Reflow Report and Column Toggle have been introduced which can be used for creating Mobile Applications. Improvements have been made to the APEX Universal Theme. These are mobile-focused enhancements which means that page headers and footers in mobiles will be displayed consistently on mobile devices. Also, floating item label templates help in optimizing the presented information on a mobile screen. There is also declarative support offered by Oracle APEX 18.1 for touch-based dynamic actions such as tap, swipe, double tap, press, and pan. Font APEX The new release includes a set of 32 x 32 high-resolution icons that automatically selects the right font size. Accessibility Accessibility mode is deprecated as the latest release will make use of APEX Advisor which consists of a bunch of tests to identify the most occurring accessibility issues. These are the major updates and improvements made in the latest Oracle APEX 18.1. Existing Oracle APEX 18.1 customers just need to install APEX 18.1 version to avail all the latest upgrades. To know more about Oracle APEX 18.1, be sure to check out the official Oracle Apex Blog. Xamarin Forms 3, the popular cross-platform UI Toolkit, is here! Firefox 60 arrives with exciting updates for web developers: Quantum CSS engine, new Web APIs and more Will Oracle become a key cloud player, and what will it mean to development & architecture community?  

Soft skills have been high on the tech agenda for a while now. This was largely down to the stereotypical (and unfair) image of the IT team as quiet, uncommunicative and awkward. But it is also related to broader changes in tech. Today, more people have a stake in software related projects. Product and project managers, even financial managers, will have their work impacted by software. That means everyone's communication around it is so important. This year's Skill Up report clearly highlights that developers are aware of how valuable soft skills really are. A huge 96% of respondents said they believe that developing soft skills is important: The Skill Up 2018 report will be available to download on Monday 4 June. Perhaps this isn't that surprising. We all know how much of a difference effective communication can make on a project. Without good communication, the technical bits of work become even harder. Why soft skills are important to developers working today If we go back to the stereotype of the ring-fenced IT team, it's not hard to see why soft skills are so valued by business leaders and management figures. It's almost as if trainers and consultants and management have conspired, saying 'we need these engineers to be more like us'. But whatever the management industry want from tech pros, it's clear that the real advantage of developing soft skills are for developers themselves. Here are just a few reasons why soft skills are so important for developers: It makes collaboration easier. You can't of course, collaborate if you don't communicate. And in today's Agile-centric software world, clear communication is crucial. When you're working to tight deadlines, being clear about your challenges and problems is vital. Soft skills can change how you focus on problems. Communication changes the way you understand problems. It changes the way they are framed. For example, is the database issue simply a technical issue, or is there a wider point about what the knock on effect for the user will be? There's usually a number of technical solutions, but to select the best one, you often need a frank and clear discussion about the impact different decisions might make. Soft skills open up your career path. When you develop your soft skills you find that you occupy a subtly different role within your team or even within your organization. You become more visible to other people - maybe even more trusted. That can only be a good thing. At a superficial level it's about status; but more importantly it allows you to push forward your own interests. How often have you found your opinions and ideas discounted or ignored? Yes, maybe your ideas were just really bad, but maybe you just didn't quite communicate them properly. Similarly, soft skills are also essential for anyone networking. True, networking is rarely anyone's favorite pastime, but doing it well could do wonders for your future. Also, meeting people is sometimes fun! Good people do exist! It makes work more enjoyable. Work isn't going to be great every day. But anyone who's worked in a job they hate will probably know that communication challenges are often at the root of their dissatisfaction. Of course, sometimes other people are the problem. But if you can keep up your end of the bargain, you've done all you can. And if you can start to help other people develop soft skills then you're well on your way to becoming an important and valuable leader. You learn more when you communicate. This really comes back to collaboration, but it's a little more specific than that. When technology changes so quickly and there are so many options out there - from what you learn to how you learn it - engaging with others can be so important. This might just be about the conversations you have with colleagues. But it's also the wider conversations you take part in within a given community. Perhaps you contribute to a forum, or maybe just like tweeting - either way you're not only playing an important role in the community, you're also pushing your knowledge and understanding forward. The reasons why soft skills are important could be huge. And given 96% of developers believe it to be important, it would seem that no one really needs convincing. However, it is important to see how soft skills impact different parts of your job, and even your life. Yes it's about writing great emails, but it isn't just that. Yes it's about learning how to network at conferences but it's also much more than that. You can't have great technical skill without soft skills The bottom line is that it's hard to be a great technician without soft skills. It's possible, but very rare. Nothing technical happens in a vacuum - technical things are always about people. Forget management speak and training courses: that, really, is the one thing you need to remember. Read next Soft skills every data scientist should teach their child ‘Soft’ Skills Every Data Pro Needs

When Qt 5.11 was released last week, a technology preview of Qt for WebAssembly was released along with it, allowing developers to run Qt applications directly inside the browser window. WebAssembly is a brand-new technology that represents a paradigm shift in web development. Leveraging this technology web developers can write high-performance applications that can run directly in the browser. A common misconception about WebAssembly is that it will eventually replace JavaScript, but the fact is that it’s intended to be used alongside JavaScript. WebAssembly is nothing but a bytecode format which is executed in a web browser. This allows an application to be deployed to a device with a compliant web browser without going through any explicit installation steps. WebAssembly is now supported by all major web browsers as a binary format for allowing executable code in web pages that is nearly as fast as native machine code. Qt uses Emscripten, an open source LLVM to JavaScript compiler. Emscripten complies Qt applications so they can run in a web browser from a web server. Deploying applications on multiple platforms is a tedious task, with WebAssembly developers need to just compile and deploy on a web server for any platform that has a browser. This feature comes in handy especially for enterprise users with multiple clients who are using different platforms. These enterprises can use Qt for WebAssembly to compile their Qt or Quick app and deploy once. Adding support for WebAssembly is a huge step forward for Qt in order to become a truly cross-platform framework. The project is currently in beta and has been released as a technology preview. You can visit the official Qt blog for more information. Qt 5.11 has arrived! How to create multithreaded applications in Qt 3 ways to deploy a QT and OpenCV application

Adobe has been searching for a missing piece in its marketing and eCommerce puzzle: an eCommerce platform. Fortunately for Adobe, they seem to have now found that piece, and it comes in the form of Magento. The company announced yesterday that it would be acquiring the popular eCommerce platform for $1.68 billion. That might sound like a weighty sum, but for Adobe - and Magento - it makes sense, especially when you consider just how competitive the marketing, eCommerce and analytics market place is at the moment. Adobe is facing stiff competition from the likes of Salesforce and Oracle. Magento, while still a popular eCommerce platform, is also seeing competition from eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. Adobe and Magento: working together to create a fully integrated marketing solution The result of this move could be a fully integrated marketing platform. The eCommerce and content management aspects would come from Magento, while Adobe would add an extra analytics dimension. This could prove very attractive to both B2C and B2B organizations, who have been faced with choice but repeatedly have to compromise or pick and choose the components they need in their platform strategy. A number of different outlets have remarked on the impressive rise of Magento's value. The company was bought by eBay in 2011 for just $180 million, then went private back in 2015 with help of VC investor Primera Funds. Although this amount was never officially disclosed, it is reported that Primera Funds stumped up $200 million. That's a pretty good return on investment. Although Magento might loos a little dated and maybe even a little small scale for Adobe, who appear more interested in tackling the enterprise and huge B2B organizations than SMEs, with more than 300,000 developers working with Magento the move isn't as outrageous as some might claim. When you consider that some of the largest organizations on the planet - like Coca-Cola - use Magento, it's more than unfair to write the eCommerce platform off. Here's what Brad Rechner, executive VP and General Manager of Digital Experience at Adobe, has to say: “Adobe is the only company with leadership in content creation, marketing, advertising, analytics and now commerce – enabling real-time experiences across the entire customer journey... Embedding commerce into the Adobe Experience Cloud with Magento enables Adobe to make every moment personal and every experience shoppable.” On the Magento side, CEO Mark Lavelle spoke of the combination of "Adobe’s strength in content and data with Magento’s open commerce innovation." Lavelle will remain the head of Magento, but will perform his role from inside Adobe's Digital Experience business. Find out more here. [news.adobe.com] Read next: Introduction to Magento 2

The release candidate for Typescript 2.9 is here! Typescript is an open-source programming language which adds optional static typing to Javascript. Let’s jump into some highlights of Typescript 2.9 RC. Changes to keyof operator TypeScript 2.9 changes the behavior of keyof to factor in both unique symbols as well as numeric literal types. TypeScript’s keyof operator is a useful way to query the property names of an existing type. Before Typescript 2.9, keyof never recognized symbolic keys. With this functionality, mapped object types like Partial, Required, or Readonly can also recognize symbolic and numeric property keys, and no longer drop properties named by symbols. Introduction of new import( ) type syntax One long-running pain-point in TypeScript has been the inability to reference a type in another module, or the type of the module itself, without including an import at the top of the file. With Typescript 2.9, their is a new import(...) type syntax. import types use the same syntax as ECMAScript’s proposed import(...) expressions, and provide a convenient way to reference the type of a module, or the types which a module contains. Trailing commas not allowed on rest parameters This break was added for conformance with ECMAScript, as trailing commas are not allowed to follow rest parameters in the specification. Changes to strictNullChecks Unconstrained type parameters are no longer assignable to object in strictNullChecks. Since generic type parameters can be substituted with any primitive type, this is a precaution TypeScript has added under strictNullChecks. To fix this, you can add a constraint on object. never can no longer be iterated over Values of type never can no longer be iterated over. Users can avoid this behavior by using a type assertion to cast to the type any. The list of entire changes and code files can be found on the Microsoft blog. You can also view the TypeScript roadmap for everything else that’s coming in 2.9 and beyond. How to install and configure TypeScript How to work with classes in Typescript Tools in TypeScript

Developers will now find it easier to build interactive web applications using R, with RStudio formally announcing that the release of Shiny 1.1.0 is on the horizon. This is expected to be a major release, with support for asynchronous operations and quite a few other important feature updates. What’s new in Shiny 1.1.0 Shiny 1.1.0 brings asynchronous programming capabilities to R, with the integration of the promises package. The main aim of this is to move away from R’s single-threaded nature and increase the scalability and overall responsiveness of the web application. This is quite an important enhancement, considering a web application traditionally designed in R was quite slow and one-dimensional. Users running a long calculation or task on a web app using Shiny would bring the process to a halt for other users. This will not be the case anymore, with the introduction of asynchronous programming features. Some of the other significant features introduced in this release include: The functions extractStackTrace and formatStackTrace are deprecated and will be removed in the future versions of Shiny Improved support for JavaScript, with a new function for comparing version strings called Shiny.compareVersion() Improved functionality of stack traces and support for deep stack traces for efficient memory allocation File drag and drop feature breaking in the presence of jQuery 3.0 has been fixed Improved error handling Bug fixes for significant performance improvement, and a lot more. You can check the full changelog for Shiny 1.1.0 on Shiny’s official Github page. Shiny has been R’s premier package for designing interactive graphics for web applications, and has been rivalling the likes of Tableau and other Business Intelligence tools. It will be interesting to see how users receive the new features introduced in 1.1.0, especially the asynchronous programming features allowing the web apps to perform faster and more efficiently. Introducing R, RStudio, and Shiny When do we use R over Python? Top 5 programming languages for crunching Big Data effectively