Microsoft has announced the general availability of its open-source, cross-platform Windows library for JavaScript. WinJS 4.0 will feature a SplitViewPaneToggle control, Pivot custom header areas, hub visual refresh, cascading menus, universal app controls, XYFocus, and content dialog. In addition, WinJS 4.0 includes support for the latest versions of leading browsers and wrappers for AngularJS, Knockout.js … continue reading
Google has moved the code repository for its Dart programming language and ecosystem onto GitHub. The company also announced it is shutting down the Chrome Dev Editor project, its JavaScript and Dart code editor. Existing pull requests will be merged onto GitHub, and Google will continue development in the form of the Chrome Apps platform, … continue reading
Client-side JavaScript brings developers closer to the glass. In a flexibly scripted programming language like JavaScript, everything is an object. Developers can code and push new features faster, enabling end users rather than making them wait months for an update under a more traditional sever-side development model. Modern Web and mobile consumer application development is … continue reading
Microsoft is working to improve its Windows Store experience by enforcing a more rigid app certification policy. The 10.1 policy will apply to new and existing customers, and is designed to eliminate app store clutter, ensure apps are appropriately priced, distinguish between informational and non-informational apps, and ensure apps have relevant titles and keywords. Microsoft … continue reading
Oculus has announced the acquisition of Surreal Vision, a computer vision team that works on real-time 3D scene reconstruction. With Surreal Vision, Oculus will be able to create an accurate representation real-world objects in virtual worlds, according to the company. “At Surreal Vision, we are overhauling state-of-the-art 3D scene reconstruction algorithms to provide a rich, … continue reading
When a small team at Sun Microsystems set out to research the future of digital devices in 1990, they could never have guessed that their work would spawn the most popular programming language for enterprise systems. Twenty years later, and Java remains the workhorse of the enterprise, despite its origin as a language for embedded … continue reading
Google has announced Preemptible Virtual Machines, a new beta cloud technology for Google Compute Engine. Preemptible VMs are cloud instances that can be shut down at any time for short-term storage capacity at a low fixed cost. Google recommended them for distributed, fault-tolerant workloads that don’t require continuous availability of any single instance. The temporary … continue reading
Microsoft wants Windows 10 to power the next generation of connected devices, and to do so the company is bringing Node.js to the core of its Internet of Things (IoT) platform. “There is an emerging trend of developers using Node.js for IoT scenarios, and we want to meet developers where they’re at and provide them … continue reading
This week’s featured GitHub project is Keras, a modular neural network and deep-learning library based on the Theano Python library. Keras allows for fast prototyping of deep-learning applications through a minimalist library structure of modular, extensible components. Developed by François Chollet, the neural network library is designed for quick experimentation, and supports both convolutional and … continue reading
The Node.js and io.js forks of the open-source JavaScript runtime platform have announced official plans to merge development under the Node.js Foundation. The merger was put to a vote on GitHub by io.js developer Mikeal Rogers, who initially proposed the merger in February, and the io.js technical committee voted to approve the merger yesterday. According … continue reading
Version 2.0 of io.js, the popular fork of the Node.js server-side JavaScript runtime platform, has been released. io.js 2.0 adds conformance to for the coming ECMAScript 6 specification of standardized JavaScript, as well as support for the latest version of Google’s Chrome V8 engine. In addition to ES6 features such as classes, the release adds … continue reading
This week’s featured GitHub project, Vorlon.js, is an extensible, platform-agnostic tool for remote JavaScript debugging and testing. Developed by the Microsoft DirectX team, Vorlon.js is powered by Node.js and the Socket.io real-time event-based communication engine. John Shewchuk, a Microsoft technical fellow and CTO of the Microsoft Developer Platform, introduced Vorlon last week at Build and … continue reading