MongoDB’s shift away from the Affero GPL to its homegrown Server-Side Public License (SSPL) can be cast as a way to clarify what open source means in the cloud or, rather, what it should mean. But it’s also very clearly an attempt to push Chinese cloud providers into paying up in cash or code if they want to strip-mine an open source project for cash while giving nothing back, as a recent interview with MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria makes clear.
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Web Development
10/22/2018 CSS Tricks
Within a grid container, there are grid cells. Any cell positioned and sized using the grid-template-* properties forms part of the explicit grid. Any grid cell that is not positioned/sized using this property forms part of the implicit grid instead.
Understanding explicit grids and implicit grids is powerful. This is my quicky take:
- Explicit: you define a grid and place items exactly where you want them to go.
- Implicit: you define a grid and let items fall
…
The post Understanding the difference between grid-template and grid-auto appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/22/2018 CSS Tricks
Every client I have averages ~30 third-party scripts but discussions about reducing them with stakeholders end in “What if we load them all async?” This is a good rebuttal because there are right and wrong ways to load third-party scripts, but there is still a cost, a cost that’s passed on to the user. And that’s what I want to investigate.
Yes, performance is a major concern. But it's not just the loading time and final weight …
The post Hard Costs of Third-Party Scripts appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/22/2018 CSS Tricks
One of the advantages of building a Single Page Application (SPA) is the way navigating between pages is extremely fast. Unfortunately, the data of our components is sometimes only available after we have navigated to a specific part of our application. We can level up the user’s perceived performance by breaking the component into two pieces: the container (which displays a skeleton view when it’s empty) and the content. If we delay the rendering of the content component until we …
The post Building Skeleton Components with React appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/22/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Docker containers are used to provide a lightweight and more portable alternative to virtual machines. Unlike virtual machines, which must bundle a complete operating system, containers typically encapsulate only an application, its runtime, and its dependent libraries. Docker is an open-source toolkit that allows you to build, deploy, and manage containers with ease.
(Insider Story)10/22/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Large organizations that transition to agile practices often get trapped between two competing principles:
(Insider Story)10/19/2018 CSS Tricks
Kelly Sutton with good advice on code reviews. Hard to pick a favorite. I like all the stuff about minding your tone and getting everyone involved, but I also think the computerization stuff is important:
If a computer can decide and enforce a rule, let the computer do it. Arguing spaces vs. tabs is not a productive use of human time.
Re: Tip #6: it's pretty cool when the tools you use can help with that, like this new GitHub …
The post 8 Tips for Great Code Reviews appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/19/2018 CSS Tricks
Nicole Sullivan asked. People said:
- 🐦... for the same reason that I buy ingredients rather than growing/raising all of my own food.
- 🐦 I write too many bugs without them.
- 🐦 Avoiding bikeshedding.
- 🐦 ... to solve problems that are adjacent to, but distinct from, the problem I'm trying to solve at hand.
- 🐦 Because to create the same functionality would require a much larger team
- 🐦 I want to be able to focus on building the product
…
The post Why Do You Use Frameworks? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/19/2018 CSS Tricks
CSS is designed in a way that allows for relatively seamless addition of new features. Since the dawn of the language, specifications have required browsers to gracefully ignore any properties, values, selectors, or at-rules they do not support. Consequently, in most cases, it is possible to successfully use a newer technology without causing any issues in older browsers.
Consider the relatively new caret-color property (it changes the color of the cursor in inputs). Its support is still low but that …
The post Using Feature Detection, Conditionals, and Groups with Selectors appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/19/2018 CSS Tricks
Dependencies in JavaScript are pretty straightforward. I can't write library.doThing() unless library exists. If library changes in some fundamental way, things break and hopefully our tests catch it.
Dependencies in CSS can be a bit more abstract. Robin just wrote in our newsletter how the styling from certain classes (e.g. position: absolute) can depend on the styling from other classes (e.g. position: relative) and how that can be — at best — obtuse sometimes.
Design has dependencies too, …
The post Dealing with Dependencies Inside Design Systems appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/19/2018 Smashing Magazine
With the latest studies and official reports out this week, it seems that to avoid an irreversible climate change on Planet Earth, we need to act drastically within the next ten years. This rose a couple of doubts and assumptions that I find worth writing about.
One of the arguments I hear often is thatwe as individuals cannot make an impact and that climate change is “the big companies’ fault”. However, we as the consumers are the ones who make the decisions what we buy and from whom, whose products we use and which ones we avoid.
10/19/2018 InfoWorld Databases
10/18/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Atlassian has upgraded its cloud-based Jira software project management tool for small development teams and more-iterative development.
Autonomy is key in the upgrade, with developers able to build their own boards to customize workflows, issue types, and fields—no longer requiring administrators to do so.
The weak Jira mobile app has been improved, with developers able to create and move boards as well as stop and start sprints. Jira integrations also are visible in the mobile app.
10/18/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
The production release of Version 7 of Angular, Google’s popular JavaScript framework for building mobile and desktop applications, is now here.
(Insider Story)10/18/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
The developers behind open source SQL database PostgreSQL, long vaunted as both an underappreciated gem and a potential replacement for Oracle, has officially released PostgreSQL version 11.
Current users of PostgreSQL shouldn’t find the changes in the new edition too jarring, but several new and revised features are worth a look—either for future database projects or incremental changes to existing ones.
10/18/2018 InfoWorld Databases
The developers behind open source SQL database PostgreSQL, long vaunted as both an underappreciated gem and a potential replacement for Oracle, has officially released PostgreSQL version 11.
Current users of PostgreSQL shouldn’t find the changes in the new edition too jarring, but several new and revised features are worth a look—either for future database projects or incremental changes to existing ones.
10/18/2018 CSS Tricks
Maxim Leyzerovich created the marching ants effect with some delectably simple SVG.
See the Pen SVG Marching Ants by Maxim Leyzerovich (@round) on CodePen.
Let's break it apart bit by bit and see all the little parts come together.
Step 1: Draw a dang rectangle
We can set up our SVG like a square, but have the aspect ratio ignored and have it flex into whatever rectangle we'd like.
<svg viewbox='0 0 40 40' preserveAspectRatio='none'>…
<rect width='40'
The post SVG Marching Ants appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/18/2018 CSS Tricks
Nils Binder has the scoop on how to manipulate elements by using border-radius by passing eight values into the property like so:
.element {
border-radius: 30% 70% 70% 30% / 30% 30% 70% 70%;
}
This is such a cool technique that he also developed a tiny web app called Fancy-Border-Radius to see how those values work in practice. It lets you manipulate the shape in any which way you want and then copy and paste that code straight into …
The post CSS border-radius can do that? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/18/2018 CSS Tricks
(This is a sponsored post.)
Hotjar is everything your team needs to:
If you are a web or UX designer or into web marketing, Hotjar will allow you to improve how your site performs. Try it for free.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink…
The post The fast and visual way to understand your users appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
10/18/2018 Smashing Magazine
In business, there’s a lot of talk about generating customer loyalty and retaining the business of good customers. Mobile apps aren’t all that different when you think about it.
While the number of installs may signal that an app is popular with users initially, it doesn’t tell the whole story. In order for an app to be successful, it must have loyal subscribers that make use of the app as it was intended.
10/18/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use RegEx (regular expressions) to work with sets of characters. Unlike the ., which matches any single character , sets enable you to match specific characters and character ranges.
10/17/2018 Smashing Magazine
Earlier this year, many of your favorite speakers were featured at SmashingConf Toronto, however, things were quite different this time. The speakers had been asked to present without slides. It was interesting to see the different ways our speakers approached the challenge.
Two of our speakers chose to demonstrate how they audit a site or application live on stage: Marcy Sutton on accessibility, and Tim Kadlec on performance. Watch the videos to see an expert perform these audits, and see if there is anything you can take back to your own testing processes.
10/17/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Most of us ought to know the acronym LAMP, used to describe web services stacks made with Linux, the Apache web server, the MySQL database server, and either PHP, Perl, or Python.
(Insider Story)10/17/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
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10/17/2018 InfoWorld Databases
(Insider Story)
10/16/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
GitHub has introduced a workflow tool called GitHub Actions to its popular code-sharing site, to allow continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) right from GitHub itself.
Using the tool, which is now in limited beta, developers can build, deploy, and update software projects on either GitHub or an external system without having to run code themselves. Workflows and infrastructure deployments can be expressed as code.
Actions adds customizable workflow capabilities to GitHub.com, so developers build and share code containers to run a software development workflow, even across multiple clouds. Other examples of tasks that can be done with actions include packaging an NPM module or sending an SMS alert.
10/16/2018 Smashing Magazine
Adobe Photoshop plays a role in almost every digital creator’s life. Photoshop is what many digital artists, photographers, graphic designers, and even some web developers have in common. The tool is so flexible that often you can achieve the same results in several different ways. What sets us all apart is our personal workflows and our preferences on how we use it to achieve the desired outcome.
I use Photoshop every day and shortcuts are a vital part of my workflow.
10/15/2018 Smashing Magazine
A website today receives a large chunk of its traffic from evergreen browsers — most of which have good support for ES6+, new JavaScript standards, new web platform APIs and CSS attributes. However, legacy browsers still need to be supported for the near future — their usage share is large enough not to be ignored, depending on your user base.
A quick look at caniuse.com’s usage table reveals that evergreen browsers occupy a lion’s share of the browser market — more than 75%.
10/15/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Mozilla’s latest beta version of the Firefox browser, Firefox Nightly, makes calls between the WebAssembly binary format and JavaScript faster, so it is easier to combine the two languages.
WebAssembly can serve as a companion to JavaScript in web development, taking on performance-intensive tasks. But thus far, combining the two has been hindered by slow function calls between the two languages, Mozilla says.
The Firefox Nightly beta makes these calls run faster than non-in-lined JavaScript-to-JavaScript function calls. Calls have been optimized from JavaScript to WebAssembly and vice versa. Mozilla also has improved the speed of calls from WebAssembly to built-ins, which are functions given by the browser such as Math.random.
10/15/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
One of the last computing chores to be sucked into the cloud is data analysis. Perhaps it’s because scientists are naturally good at programming and so they enjoy having a machine on their desks. Or maybe it’s because the lab equipment is hooked up directly to the computer to record the data. Or perhaps it’s because the data sets can be so large that it’s time-consuming to move them.
(Insider Story)10/15/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Microsoft is perhaps the most impressive company on the planet right now. While it doesn’t (currently) dominate markets like it used to, Microsoft has managed something dramatically more difficult, something that portends future success as a platform behemoth: profound cultural change.
(Insider Story)10/15/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Microsoft’s Entity Framework is an open-source object-relational mapper, or ORM, for ADO.Net that helps you isolate the object model of your application from the data model. Entity Framework simplifies data access in your application by allowing you to write code to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations without having to know how the data is persisted in the underlying database.
(Insider Story)10/12/2018 Smashing Magazine
Did you know that a simple search for “depression” on the iPhone App Store brings up 198 results? In the Android Play Store, it brings up 239. The categories range from “Medical” to “Health & Fitness” to “Lifestyle.” The apps themselves offer everything from “depressing wallpaper” to “mood tracker” to “life coach.” We are approaching a golden age of digital therapeutics and design for mental health — if we as UX practitioners do our jobs well.
10/12/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Some R users become leery of graphical user interfaces. Pointing and clicking and dragging may be convenient, but it can be harder to save, check, or rerun an analysis.
But I think even most hardcore command-line junkies would agree that a drag-and-drop interface can be helpful for some exploratory data visualization.
That’s what the new R package esquisse brings to ggplot2. It gives the best of both worlds: drag-and-drop, plus generating basic ggplot code for the graphs you create. And, it’s pretty cool! esquisse was created by two people at a French R consulting firm, DreamRs. The name esquisse is French for sketch.
10/12/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
See how the new graphical user interface for ggplot2 works, thanks to the esquisse R package
10/11/2018 Smashing Magazine
My grandma makes the best, most fluffiest, go weak-in-your-knees buns that anybody has ever tasted. The problem is, there’s a ton of secret ingredients (and I’m not just talking love) that go into those buns, and those ingredients and directions are all stored in my grandma’s head.
We all have family recipes like that, and instead of possibly forgetting them, in this article we’re going to create a mobile app for iOS and Android using Xamarin.
10/11/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Puppet is developing applications to provide operational insights and vulnerability assessments for devops.
Devops insights tool
The Puppet Insights tool, which arose from Puppet’s June 2018 acquisition of data visualization company Reflect, is intended to measure the impacts of devops investments by aggregating and analyzing data across the tool chain, with visibility into the software delivery pipeline. Dashboards help identify the velocity, quality, and impact of software delivery teams and processes. Aspects such as software defect rates are measured in evaluating a software delivery project.
10/11/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
(Insider Story)
10/10/2018 Smashing Magazine
Forms. It’s no coincidence that the word rhymes with “yawns” — web forms are dull to code and even duller for your visitors to fill in. But without forms, the web would just be a library. They let us comment, collect, book, buy, share, and a host of other verbs. And mostly they enable us to do these things in an awkward, opaque, confusing, odd, frustrating, alarming, or alienating way.
10/10/2018 Smashing Magazine
Let’s start with a registration form. Most companies want long-term relationships with their users. To do that they need users to sign up. And to do that, they need to give users value in return. Nobody wants to sign up to your service — they just want to access whatever it is you offer, or the promise of a faster experience next time they visit.
Despite the registration form’s basic appearance, there are many things to consider: the primitive elements that make up a form (labels, buttons, and inputs), ways to reduce effort (even on small forms like this), all the way through to form validation.
10/10/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
A book published in 1981, called Nailing Jelly to a Tree, describes software as “nebulous and difficult to get a firm grip on.” That was true in 1981, and it is no less true nearly four decades since. Software, whether it is an application you bought or one that you built yourself, remains hard to deploy, hard to manage, and hard to run.
Docker containers provide a way to get a grip on software. You can use Docker to wrap up an application in such a way that its deployment and runtime issues—how to expose it on a network, how to manage its use of storage and memory and I/O, how to control access permissions—are handled outside of the application itself, and in a way that is consistent across all “containerized” apps. You can run your Docker container on any OS-compatible host (Linux or Windows) that has the Docker runtime installed.
10/09/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Microsoft has released through open source its Infer.Net cross-platform framework for model-based machine learning.
Infer.Net will become part of the ML.Net machine learning framework for .Net developers, with Infer.Net extending ML.Net for statistical modeling and online learning. Several steps toward integration already have been taken, including the setting up of a repo under the .Net Foundation.
Microsoft cited the applicability of Infer.Net to three use cases:
10/09/2018 InfoWorld Application Development
Microsoft has released the 0.6 version of its ML.Net machine learning framework, aimed at .Net developers. The update adds a new and more useful model-building API set, the ability to use more existing models to provide predictions, and better performance overall.
The original ML.Net API limited the kinds of pipelines you could build and had some clumsy restrictions on labeling and scoring data. The new API more flexibly allows training and prediction processes to be made up of multiple components that can be joined together in a variety of combinations, instead of requiring a single linear pipeline. The goal is to emulate the design of APIs used to drive other frameworks like Apache Spark.
10/09/2018 Smashing Magazine
(This is a sponsored post.) For a long time, UI animation was an afterthought for designers. Even today, many designers think of animation as something that brings delight but does not necessarily improve usability. If you share this point of view, then this article is for you. I will discuss how animation can improve the user experience of landing pages, and I’ll provide the best examples of animation created using the Slides framework.
10/09/2018 InfoWorld Databases
Building distributed systems is hard. When you’re working with applications that span a planet, the speed of light is a brake on what you want to do, complicating data replication among servers and services. Someone buys a widget in Hong Kong at almost the same time as someone in Paris, but there’s only one in stock. How do you know who to bill, and who to tell the purchase failed? Whose purchase ends up being the one recorded in your line-of-business tools?
(Insider Story)10/08/2018 Smashing Magazine
WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) by far —powering more than 30% of the web. It has undergone a huge metamorphosis during its 15 years of existence. Its latest addition is Gutenberg which is to be released in version 5.0.
Named after Johannes Gutenberg (the inventor of the printing press), Gutenberg is going to fundamentally change WordPress, further helping reach its goal to democratize publishing.
WordPress usually releases its major features as a plugin to test the waters before baking them into the core.
10/08/2018 InfoWorld Databases
PostgreSQL is an open-source, object-relational (also called extended relational) database management system. Modern relational database features in PostgreSQL include complex queries, foreign keys, triggers, updatable views, transactional integrity, and multi-version concurrency control. Users can extend PostgreSQL with new data types, functions, operators, aggregate functions, index methods, and procedural languages.
(Insider Story)10/05/2018 Smashing Magazine
This year, many of your favorite speakers were featured at our conference in Toronto, however, things were quite different this time. The speakers had been asked to present without slides. Yep, and it was brilliant!
In this pairing of videos from SmashingConf Toronto, discover sketching with Eva-Lotta Lamm and SVG Animation with Sarah Drasner, but if you fancy watching all of them then head on over to our SmashingConf Vimeo channel anytime.
10/05/2018 Smashing Magazine
Do you want to discover the next exciting JavaScript features that you didn’t even know you needed? In this article, I will introduce one of these proposals that if accepted may change the way you write code the same way the spread operator did.
However, here’s a small disclaimer: This feature is under development and discussion. The goal here is to add some hype around it and create awareness of the hard work that TC39 is doing to find consensus, fix all the syntax and semantics issues and have it shipped with the next releases of ECMAScript.
10/04/2018 Smashing Magazine
We come to the final part in my Flexbox series here at Smashing Magazine. In this post, I am going to spend some time thinking about what the use cases for Flexbox really are, given that we now have CSS Grid Layout, giving some suggestions for what you might use when and a way to decide.
Earlier In This Series If you haven’t picked up the other articles yet, this is essentially a concluding post so check those out first.
10/03/2018 InfoWorld Databases
MySQL is a complex system that requires many tools to repair, diagnose, and optimize it. Fortunately for admins, MySQL has attracted a vibrant community of developers who have put out high-quality open source tools to help with the complexity, performance, and health of MySQL systems, most of which are available for free.
(Insider Story)10/03/2018 Smashing Magazine
Are you looking to combine Google’s material design with Angular applications? Well, look no further!
In this tutorial, we’re going to build a news application using two of the most powerful and popular resources out there, Angular 6 and material design. You’ll learn how to incorporate Google’s material design components into Angular application templates to change and style your application in a professional way. The tutorial also serves as a reminder of how to make HTTP requests to bring live news articles to an application using the News API.
09/28/2018 Web Developer Juice
In order to be successful, a company needs to be on the same page and everything needs to work together. Their business processes, which can range from sales, to marketing, to manufacturing, and a variety of other things, need to be executed properly to achieve success. One of the best ways to ensure your business […]
The post Process Management Solution For a Business appeared first on Web Developer Juice.
09/28/2018 InfoWorld Databases
You are setting up a quick report around sales for the year, and it needs to use three separate databases. One is an object database running on Amazon Web Services. The second and third are relational databases running on Microsoft Azure.
(Insider Story)09/27/2018 InfoWorld Databases
“MySQL done better” is one way to describe MariaDB. It’s a fork of that popular open source database project, launched by one of MySQL’s own creators—but with a different development team, many powerful features included by default rather than only available as add-ons, and many performance, usability, and security improvements that aren’t guaranteed to show up in MySQL.
(Insider Story)09/26/2018 InfoWorld Databases
Remember Snort? Or Asterisk? Or Jaspersoft or Zimbra? Heck, you might still be using them. All of these open source champions—InfoWorld Best of Open Source Software Award winners 10 years ago—are still going strong. And why not? They’re still perfectly useful.
Ten years ago these tools were among the best answers to pressing needs in the enterprise network—for intrusion detection, call management, reporting, and collaboration. But looking back on them now, you can’t help but think, “Wow. Software was so much simpler then.”
But even as we grapple with the likes of microservice architecture, distributed data processing frameworks, deep neural networks, and “dapps,” we remain steadfast in our commitment to bring you—this year and every year—the best that open source has to offer. Welcome to InfoWorld’s 2018 Best of Open Source Software Awards!
09/26/2018 InfoWorld Databases
09/24/2018 InfoWorld Databases
If you are tuned in to the latest technology concepts around big data, you’ve likely heard the term “data lake.” The image conjures up a large reservoir of water—and that’s what a data lake is, in concept: a reservoir. Only it’s for data.
Data lake defined
A data lake holds a vast amount of raw, unstructured data in its native format.
Therefore, all you need is a device that supports a flat file system, which means you can use a mainframe if you want. The data is moved to other servers for processing. Most enterprises go with the Hadoop File System (HDFS), because it is designed for fast processing of large data sets and is used in a big data environment where a data lake is likely to be used.