InfoQ Homepage News
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Jetbrains Previews Jetpack Compose for Web
JetBrains, who recently ported Jetpack Compose to the desktop, has now released a technology preview of Jetpack Compose for Web. Kotlin developers may soon be able to use Jetpack Compose for cross-platform development (Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, the web — but not iOS).
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Mercury Brings Visual Basic to Feature Parity with C# and Adds Multiple Platform Support
RemObjects Mercury refreshes Visual Basic for .NET by adding support for current .NET features while also making it available for more platforms, including WebAssembly, iOS, Android, and Linux.
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Airbnb Builds Himeji - a Scalable Centralized Authorization System
Airbnb recently described how it built Himeji, a scalable centralized authorization system. Himeji stores permissions data and performs permission checks as a central source of truth. It uses a sharded and replicated in-memory cache to improve performance and lower latencies and has served checks in production for about a year.
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Variations on New Normal for Workplaces
Over the last year office work has shifted to almost completely remote, and as vaccination programs roll out around the world it is shifting again. There is a lot of speculation around what the new normal will look like. Employee well-being, flexibility in working arrangements, availability creep, virtual and augmented reality are all factors impacting what work could look like going forward.
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Researchers Publish Biologically Plausible AI Training Method
A team of researchers at Oxford University developed an algorithm called zero-divergence inference learning (Z-IL), an alternative to the backpropagation (BP) algorithm for training neural network AI models. Z-IL has been shown to exactly reproduce the results of BP on any neural network, but unlike BP does not violate known principles of brain function.
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AWS Announces the General Availability of CloudFront Functions
Recently, AWS announced the general availability of CloudFront Functions, a new edge computing capability. With this new CloudFront feature, customers can run JavaScript functions across the Cloud Front edge locations worldwide.
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Java News Roundup - Week of May 3rd, 2021
This week’s Java news roundup features news from OpenJDK, the GA release of Kotlin 1.5, point releases on Eclipse projects, Micronaut Coherence 1.0.0-M1, Quarkus-2.0.0-Alpha2, updates on Spring projects, and developer surveys from Jakarta EE and Payara Platform 2021.
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New Exploit Breaks Current Spectre Defenses; Fixes Hard without Performance Impact
Researchers from the University of Virginia School of Engineering recently disclosed a new Spectre hardware exploit that can steal secrets via Intel/AMD micro-op caches and circumvents current Spectre defenses. Intel and AMD say no new guidance is needed. Researchers say suggested fixes are inconvenient to deploy or have performance drawbacks.
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.NET News Roundup - Week of May 3rd, 2021
This past week was marked by a new Visual Studio Code release and Pure Virtual C++, a virtual event hosted by Microsoft. InfoQ examined this and a number of smaller stories in the .NET ecosystem from the week of May 3rd, 2021.
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How GitHub Leverages Feature Flags to Ship Quickly and Safely
In a recent blog post, Alberto Gimeno, GitHub actions engineer, shared how GitHub makes use of feature flags to enable frequent, safe deployments. GitHub leverages feature flags for all potentially risky changes, allowing them to quickly disable the change if needed.
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Amazon Nimble Studio: Visual Effects, Animations, and Interactive Content on AWS
Amazon has recently announced Nimble Studio, a service for creative studios to produce visual effects, animations, and interactive content. The cloud-based studio provides on-demand access to virtual workstations, elastic file storage, render farm capacity and tools to manage security, permissions, and collaborations.
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Microsoft Announces Preview Service for Building Real-Time Web Applications Called Azure Web PubSub
Recently Microsoft announced a preview of Azure Web PubSub, a new service for building real-time web applications. Azure Web PubSub is a fully-managed service that supports native and serverless WebSockets.
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Kotlin 1.5 Gets Support for Java 15 Features and a New JVM Compiler
Kotlin 1.5 introduces support for the latest Java features, including record classes, sealed interfaces, and inline classes. Additionally, it brings a number of improvements to the standard library and a new JVM IR compiler.
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Atlassian Open DevOps Integrates Jira with Tools Like GitHub and Datadog
Atlassian has released Open DevOps, their new platform offering integrating Atlassian products and partner offerings. Open DevOps integrates Jira Software, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Opsgenie into a single project. It is possible to integrate with other tools, such as GitHub and Datadog, with minimal integration.
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Grain: Your WebAssembly-First Programming Language - WebAssembly Summit 2021
Oscar Spencer recently presented Grain, a new strongly-typed, high-level language that compiles to WebAssembly. Grain includes functional programming features (e.g., type inference, pattern matching, closures) while allowing mutable variables. Grain also has a standard library with composite data structures (Option, Stack, Result) and system calls (e.g., I/O, process handling).