Microsoft announced it has open-sourced the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) framework as a .NET Foundation project. According to a blog post by WCF project lead Ron Cain, the new open-source version of WCF will target the .NET Core framework for cross-platform architectures on Linux, OS X and Windows. Visual Studio 2015 RC also supports WCF … 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
IBM has announced a new suite of beta services for the OpenStack cloud platform, enabling developers and enterprises to integrate applications and data across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The new IBM Cloud OpenStack Services allow developers to launch applications on-premises or in the OpenStack cloud using IBM’s SoftLayer cloud computing infrastructure, without making … continue reading
OpenStack is receiving more attention these days as more and more enterprises are moving toward the open-source cloud-computing platform. A recent survey from Red Hat revealed that 75% of respondents are turning to OpenStack for cloud initiatives for various stages of deployment, ranging from learning and evaluation to preparing for deployment. “These survey findings are … 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
A Linux Foundation workgroup is determined to make it easier to work with open-source code and comply with licenses with the release of the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) specification 2.0. “When creating products from open-source code, it is important to respect the terms of the license in the code, if you’re going to use … continue reading
Mozilla has announced an update to Firefox 38, and despite the company’s dislike for Digital Rights Management (DRM), support will be included for it in the update. “We don’t believe DRM is a desirable market solution, but it’s currently the only way to watch a sought-after segment of content,” wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, senior VP of … 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
Google has launched Cloud Bigtable, a scalable, fully managed NoSQL database service available through the open-source Apache HBase API. Google Cloud Bigtable is an enterprise-focused NoSQL service for high-volume data ingestion, analytics and data-heavy serving workloads. The service includes a natively integrated open-source interface for Hadoop imported to existing HBase clusters along with replicated storage … continue reading
GitHub wants to bring its Web development technology to the desktop. We’re self-aggrandizing this week’s GitHub Project of the Week with Electron, a framework of GitHub’s own making. Formerly known as Atom Shell, it is a cross-platform framework for creating desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS, based on the io.js and Chromium runtimes and … continue reading
The Apache Software Foundation has announced Apache Parquet as a Top-Level Project. Apache Parquet, a columnar Hadoop storage format, is used across Big Data processing frameworks, data models and query engines from MapReduce and Apache Spark to Apache Hive, Impala and others. Parquet’s ascension to a Top-Level Project signifies the health and maturity of the … continue reading
