The Apache Software Foundation has announced Apache Flink as a Top-Level Project (TLP). Flink is an open-source Big Data system that fuses processing and analysis of both batch and streaming data. The data-processing engine, which offers APIs in Java and Scala as well as specialized APIs for graph processing, is presented as an alternative to … continue reading
NASA’s been writing mission-critical software for space exploration for decades, and now the organization is turning those guidelines into a coding standard for the software development industry. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Laboratory for Reliable Software recently published a set of code guidelines, “The Power of Ten—Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code.” The paper’s … continue reading
Python creator Guido van Rossum’s proposal for static type-checking annotations is inching closer to reality, and the feature has taken on a new name: type hinting. Back in August, van Rossum published a proposal on the Python mailing list recommending type-checking annotations as a valuable feature for the next version of Python to improve the … continue reading
Software industry mergers and acquisitions rose dramatically this past year, with Facebook’s moves accounting for 20% of the growth. In its Software Industry M&A Report for 2014, investment bank Berkery Noyes revealed a 14% increase in the number of deals to a total of 1,840 transactions, with deal value rising 36% from US$88.32 billion to … continue reading
Facebook announced it has acquired Wit.ai, a voice-recognition and natural-language processing startup with technology akin to Apple’s Siri. The Wit.ai platform and natural-language processing API, which has a community of more than 6,000 developers, will remain free and open source, according to a Wit.ai blog post The acquisition could help draw more developers to Facebook, … continue reading
The Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) has released two specifications to help organizations increase software quality. Managed by the Object Management Group (OMG), CISQ was chartered in 2009 to create specifications for measuring source code quality that can be approved by the OMG. “[The] industry needs standard, low-cost, automated measures for evaluating software size … continue reading
Rumors have floated around for months that Microsoft was finally thinking of dropping the Internet Explorer name. The latest rumors, sources reportedly told ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, go a step further. When Windows 10 ships in 2015, sources say, in addition to IE the OS will sport an entirely new browser, codenamed Spartan. Rather than … continue reading
Happy Almost 2015, GitHubbers! To cap off the year in GitHub, we have the Top 5 projects of the month of December. I wanted to do the Top 5 of 2014, but alas the GitHub trending feature doesn’t have a yearly time span option. #1: io.js, the month’s most popular project providing evented I/O for … continue reading
Google released a list of its must-have Android apps, rattling off 127 of the most highly recommended and highest rated apps in the Google Play Store. The apps, most of them free, range from popular favorites including Netflix, Shazam and Spotify to mobile applications with fast-growing user bases such as Quip, Pushbullet and Lumosity. Google’s full … continue reading
In 2014, “mobile” evolved into a more widely unified and interconnected concept. The last several years have seen smartphones, tablets and mobile apps take control of how we consume and compute information, redefining how we communicate with each other. A train with that much momentum doesn’t stop when the market reaches its peak; it barrels … continue reading
In 2014, the selection of cloud platforms and services was more plentiful than ever before, and it saw countless partnerships and integrations to tie them all together. Cloud users and developers are dropping eggs in many different baskets, be it Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud or open-source platforms such as … continue reading
Application performance management solution provider Dynatrace is a private entity once more, becoming an independent business and naming John Van Siclen as its new CEO. After the initial dynaTrace company, which also had Van Siclen as its CEO, was acquired by Compuware in 2011, the company assumed the role of the APM business in the … continue reading
