Devpost, the hackathon platform formerly known as ChallengePost, has released its first Student Hacker Report for the 2014-2015 academic year, ranking the most popular platforms, programming languages, APIs, libraries, frameworks and more at hackathons over the past year.
The report shows Android edging out iOS 38.2% to 22.7% for the most popular mobile platform, while the Top Five programming languages were HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python, Java and C/C++. On the API front, Twilio took the title of most popular communications API, Facebook took top social API, Venmo was the No. 1 payment API, Spotify landed the top music API, and Google Maps topped all geo APIs.
The report also identified Android Studio as the most popular IDE, MongoDB as the most popular database, and Unity as the top game engine at hackathons, while Node.js took the title of top app framework, and jQuery was named the No.1 library.
The full report is available here.
Git 2.5 released with multiple worktrees and triangular workflows
Version 2.5 of the open-source Git source-code repository has been released, including new features such as multiple worktrees and triangular workflows.
The new Git worktree feature allows for one Git repository with multiple working trees, with each linked tree acting as a pseudo-repository with its own working copy. Git’s triangular workflow support enables better maintenance of upstream, origin and local code as it’s fetched and pushed from code editors to repositories.
The release also includes performance improvements for large working trees and trees stored on networked file systems, as well as the removal of clean/smudge filters as a requirement for input reading. More details are available here.
Java 9 to feature JShell and REPL
Java 9 will introduce JShell and a read-eval-print loop (REPL). With REPLs, users will be able to evaluate code snippets and to test their code as it is created.
According to the Shell Java Enhancement Proposal for the project, REPL is a result of academic feedback.
“Schools are adopting languages that have REPL functionality because it lowers the initial learning curve of programming. The interactive REPL tool gives rapid evaluation of code to young developers,” wrote Yolande Poirier, community manager for the Java developer community, wrote in a blog post.
IBM Cloudant open-sources CouchDB search integration with Lucene
IBM has announced it is open-sourcing Cloudant Search’s code repositories Clouseau and Dreyfus.
“This code powers Cloudant’s full-text search system, which combines our Apache CouchDB-based service with the Apache Lucene text search engine library,” wrote Bob Newson, engineer for Cloudant, in a blog post.
Clouseau is made up of Scala code and provides access to the Lucene library. Dreyfus is written in Erlang and manages Clouseau nodes to provide full-text search features.
IBM also announced it intends to contribute Clouseau and Dreyfus to the Apache CouchDB project.
