InfoWorld

With the newly released version 22.0 of the Oracle-developed GraalVM polyglot runtime, the open source project’s developers aimed to improve the developer experience. Released January 24 for JDK 11 and JDK 17 , the most-current long-term support releases of standard Java, GraalVM 22.0 Community Edition can be downloaded from GitHub . Enterprise builds of GraalVM 22.0 are available from Oracle . To read this article in full, please click here

React remains a flagship among front-end JavaScript frameworks, and the React team continues to pursue avenues to keep it relevant. One of the more important developments on the roadmap is React Server Components. React Server Components provide a means of offloading the work behind a component to the server. This avoids having to ship bundled JavaScript and having to serve secondary API requests to hydrate the component. React Server Components are a preview feature that can be enabled in Re...

As the world of business grows more complex and instantaneous, reducing time to insight with modern data analytics is the name of the game. In fact, the number one metric for every company today should be time to insight. How do you calculate time to insight? It’s a function of two measures: (1) How quickly you can make new source data ready and available for analytics; (2) How quickly you can segment your data and query it in different ways. The first is difficult. Everyone wants real-time d...

Looking to bolster the appeal of Visual Studio Code to Java developers, Microsoft has published a roadmap for bringing new Java-related capabilities to the code editor. Among the goals is making it easier to migrate to VS Code from other Java IDEs. There are now more than 1.5 million Java developers using the code editor, Microsoft said. Several areas of investment have been designated for 2022, including the “inner loop” development experience, cloud-native development, build tools, performa...

The history of modern containers is long and complicated, going back to the days of the mainframe and then through technologies like Solaris Zones to Linux’s adoption of cgroups as a foundation of its OS-level virtualization features. Those Linux Containers (LXC) were a key part of the early Docker platform, providing an isolated userspace to host and run Docker containers. As containers continued to evolve, Docker developed its own runtime environment, which was adopted by many open source m...

Although Python turned 30 years old last year (2021), only in the last few years has it enjoyed the great explosion of adoption, growth, and forward-thinking development that we’ve come to associate with the language. Many features of Python have remained unchanged since its inception, but with every passing year, and every new edition of Python, along come new ways of doing things and new libraries that take advantage of those advances. So Python has its old ways and its new ways. Naturally,...

The Ruby community has released Ruby 3.1 , an upgrade to the open source dynamic programming language that introduces a new in-process JIT (just-in-time) compiler to improve the performance of Ruby applications. Introduced on Christmas Day, Ruby 3.1, or Ruby 3.1.0, adds the YJIT (Yet Another Ruby JIT) , a lightweight, minimalistic Ruby JIT built inside CRuby. YJIT uses a Basic Block Versioning architecture, with a JIT compiler inside of it. YJIT achieves fast warmup and performance improvemen...

Let’s say there’s a five-year-old midsize biotech company. We’ll call it MidCo, and they specialize in the automated testing of blood and tissue samples. The bottom line boomed during MidCo’s first five years in business. However, new startup competitors produce more advanced products that can leverage technologies such as artificial intelligence, and MidCo’s competitors offer their solutions at much lower prices. In other words, MidCo is being disrupted. MidCo’s IT department can’t keep up w...

The importance of observability has been well established, with organizations relying on metrics, logs, and traces to help detect, diagnose, and isolate problems in their environments. But, like most things in IT, observability is continuing to evolve rapidly – both in terms of how people define it and how they are working to improve observability in practice. I’ve argued in the past that observability is, at its core, a data analytics problem . The formal definition of observability tends to...

TypeScript 4.6, the next iteration of Microsoft’s strongly typed superset of JavaScript , has moved to a beta release, with enhancements for coding and control flow analysis. The beta was announced on January 21. One improvement relaxes coding restrictions by allowing code in constructors before super() . In JavaScript classes, it is mandatory to call super() prior to referring to this . TypeScript also enforced this but was a bit too strict, according to a bulletin on TypeScript 4.6 . It had...

Pijul, an open source distributed version control system that relies on a “theory of patches” to simplify workflows, is now available as a beta release. Described as the first distributed version control system based on a sound mathematical theory of changes, Pijul has features that make it simpler to work with than Git and also enable it to scale to large repositories and fast-paced workflows, according to the project’s documentation. Unveiled January 18, the Pijul beta follows the alpha rel...

As the hype around Web3 reaches fever pitch, there is a growing divide between engineers who see an exciting new paradigm for web development and those who only see efforts to make a quick buck, wrapped in plenty of techno-vapor. As Web3 is currently defined , it is a vision for the public internet where data and content are registered on blockchains, tokenized, or managed and accessed on peer-to-peer distributed networks. It is the decentralized internet that currently supports cryptocurrenc...

Can you help your business create a single source of truth for all its customer data, including touchpoints from marketing, sales, and support functions in a single data platform? Can the platform integrate every customer interaction, including website visits, mobile app engagements, product consumption, store visits, social media activities, and other customer engagements? The idea of building a 360-degree customer view has been around for a long time and was one of the early promises made b...

Outside the insurance industry, few people likely noticed that Lloyd’s of London “will no longer cover the fallout of cyberattacks exchanged between nation-states.” It would be easy to overlook, except that Lloyd’s is a major global insurer; its actions will have a ripple effect. It’s already the case that ransomware attacks across the globe have prompted Lloyd’s syndicate members to charge higher premiums while pulling back coverage for rank-and-file enterprises by nearly 50%. To read this a...

This point release arriving January 20, 2022, just days after Rust 1.58, fixes a race condition in the std::fs::remove_dir_all standard library function. This vulnerability is tracked at CVE-2022-21658 and there was an advisory published . An attacker could use this security issue to trick a privileged program into deleting files and directories that the attacker otherwise could not access or delete. Rust versions 1.0 through 1.58 are affected by this vulnerability. Users are advised to updat...