InfoWorld

Canonical has released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, aka “Noble Numbat,” a new Long Term Support release of the popular Linux distribution that brings performance enhancements and toolchain updates for developers. Announced April 25 and downloadable from ubuntu.com , Ubuntu 24.04 LTS offers Linux 6.8 kernel capabilities with improved syscall performance, nested KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) support on ppc64el (IBM PowerPC), and access to the new beachefs file system. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has merged low-la…

Microsoft has introduced version 8 of the .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) Community Toolkit, featuring TouchBehavior, for interacting with visual elements in an application based on touch, mouse clicks, and hover events. The update was introduced April 24 . Instructions for getting started with the toolkit are available on GitHub . With the new release, the TouchBehavior implementation enables customization of different visual properties on the VisualElement it is attached to, such as the bac…

Platform engineering is becoming a compelling concept for enterprises, as they’re devoting increasingly large amounts of resources into cloud-native application development. It doesn’t matter if you’re using your own Kubernetes instances in your data centers, or working with managed environments in public clouds, you’re going to need to understand how they’re operating, taking advantage of a new generation of observability and security tools. To read this article in full, please click here

Buzz is building around the idea that it’s time to claw back our cloud services and once more rebuild the company data center. Repatriation . It’s the act of moving work out of cloud and back to on-premises or self-managed hardware. And the primary justification for this movement is straightforward, especially in a time of economic downturn. Save money by not using AWS, Azure, or the other cloud hosting services. Save money by building and managing your own infrastructure. Since an Andreesen Ho…

Chatbots like ChatGPT , Claude.ai , and Meta.ai can be quite helpful, but you might not always want your questions or sensitive data handled by an external application. That's especially true on platforms where your interactions may be reviewed by humans and otherwise used to help train future models. One solution is to download a large language model (LLM) and run it on your own machine. That way, an outside company never has access to your data. This is also a quick option to try some new spe…

Node.js 22, the latest version of the popular JavaScript runtime, has arrived, featuring require() support for ECMAScript modules, an improved WebSocket client, and an updated version of the Google V8 JavaScript engine. Announced April 24 , version 22 of the event-driven, asynchronous runtime can be downloaded from Nodejs.org . The release adds require() support for synchronous ECMAScript module graphs under the flag: --experimental-require-module . If this flag is enabled and the ES module mee…

Java Development Kit (JDK) 23, the next planned version of standard Java, is off and running, with four features now scheduled for the release. The latest two additions are a vector API, which will be incubated for the eighth time, and a second preview of stream gatherers. Due September 19, JDK 23 also will include a second preview of a class-file API and a preview of primitive types in patterns, instanceof , and switch . The vector API , which has been incubated in previous Java versions from …

Cloud-based data warehouse company Snowflake has developed an open-source large language model (LLM), Arctic, to take on the likes of Meta’s Llama 3 , Mistral’s family of models, xAI’s Grok-1 , and Databricks’ DBRX . To read this article in full, please click here

OpenAI, known for its large language model ChatGPT, is making a strong push for the enterprise market. In what could intensify competition among enterprise AI players , the company announced a slew of new features designed to give businesses more control, enhance security, and offer cost-effective options when integrating OpenAI’s AI technologies in their operations. “We’re deepening our support for enterprises with new features that are useful for both large businesses and any developers who a…

WebAssembly runtime maker Wasmer has unveiled py2wasm, a Python -to-WebAssembly compiler that transforms Python programs to the WebAssembly (aka Wasm) binary instruction format. Using a fork of the Nuitka Python compiler , py2wasm converts Python programs to Wasm, allowing them to run without interpreter overhead. Introduced April 18, py2wasm addresses a situation in which the performance of Python programs in WebAssembly has been less than ideal, Wasmer founder and CEO Syrus Akbary wrote in a …

Generative AI entered the global consciousness with a bang at the close of 2022 (cue: ChatGPT ), but making it work in the enterprise has amounted to little more than a series of stumbles. Shadow AI use in the enterprise is sky high as employees are making day-to-day task companions out of AI chat tools. But for the knowledge-intensive workflows that are core to an organization’s mission, generative AI has yet to deliver on its lofty promise to transform the way we work. To read this article in…

WebAssembly was originally designed to give in-browser web applications a way to run portable, sandboxed, high-performance binaries. As WASM matures beyond the browser , new uses for the technology are emerging. Using WASM to build programmability and extensibility into applications is one use case that is gathering steam. The Extism software library lets you write programs that can interface with extensions written in WebAssembly. Extism handles the data and function-calling interface between …

Promises are a central mechanism for handling asynchronous code in JavaScript. You will find them in many JavaScript libraries and frameworks, where they're used to manage the results of an action. The fetch() API is one example of promises at work. As a developer, you might not be familiar with creating and using promises outside of an existing product, but it's surprisingly simple. Learning how to create promises will help you understand how libraries use them. It also puts a powerful asynchr…

Microsoft has introduced a new family of small language models (SLMs) as part of its plan to make lightweight yet high-performing generative artificial intelligence technology available across more platforms, including mobile devices. The company unveiled the Phi-3 platform in three models: the 3.8-billion-parameter Phi-3 Mini, the 7-billion-parameter Phi-3 Small, and the 14-billion-parameter Phi-3 Medium. The models comprise the next iteration of Microsoft’s SLM product line that began with th…

Oracle has released JDK Mission Control (JMC) 9, an update to the tool kit for monitoring, managing, profiling, and troubleshooting Java applications that adds a dark theme and makes the frequency of JVM checks configurable. The most significant change is that JMC now must use JDK 17 or later to run. JMC 9 was unveiled on April 21 . Binaries can be downloaded from oracle.com . While JMC 9 requires JDK 17 or later, it still can read Java Flight Recorder (JFR) recordings from JDK 7u40 or later. J…