Further clarifying its ongoing support plans for Java SE (Standard Edition) 8, Oracle will require businesses to have a commercial license to get updates after January 2019.
In an undated bulletin about the revision, Oracle said public updates for Java SE 8 released after January 2019 will not be available for business, commercial, or production use without a commercial license. However, public updates for Java SE 8 will be available for individual, personal use through at least the end of 2020.
End of public updates for Java 8
Oracle advises enterprises to review the Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap to assess support requirements in order to migrate to a later release or obtain a commercial license. Customers who use Java SE as part of another Oracle product can continue to access Java SE 8 for those products beyond 2019 for those products. Oracle advises developers to review roadmaps for Java SE 8 and beyond and take appropriate action based on their application and its distribution model.
To read this article in full, please click here
React components can, and often do, have state. State can be anything, but think of things like whether a user is logged in or not and displaying the correct username based on which account is active. Or an array of blog posts. Or if a modal is open or not and which tab within it is active.
React components with state render UI based on that state. When the state of components changes, so does the component UI. …
The post Understanding React `setState` appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
About a year ago, we came to a crossroad that changed the way we build software today. Like many other teams, we were working on a few things at a time, developing different projects for our web and mobile applications, with shared ingredients in the form of common Node.js code between our back-end repositoriess and microservices, and common React UI components with some slight visual and functional differences between our apps.
GraphQL, developed by Facebook and released as an open standard for all to use, provides a way to create and consume web-based APIs that is designed to be an alternative to REST APIs. With GraphQL, queries and returned data use formal schemas and a type system to guarantee consistency.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)
Node.js 10.0.0 has been released, and will become the platform’s Long Term Support (LTS) line in October 2018. As the LTS line, it will be supported for three years.
Version 10.0.0 add supports for the OpenSSL 1.1.0 security toolkit but focuses mainly on incremental improvements. Also, while Node.js 10.0.0 ships with NPM 5.7, the 10.x line will be upgraded to NPM Version 6 later on; NPM 6 will offer performance, stability, and security improvements.
New features in Node.js 10
In addition to OpenSSL 1.1.0 support, other features in the Node.js 10.0.0 release include:
To read this article in full, please click here
Una Kravets shows how to make layouts in CSS Grid with flexbox fallbacks for browsers that don’t support those grid properties just yet. Una writes:
CSS grid is AMAZING! However, if you need to support users of IE11 and below, or Edge 15 and below, grid won't really work as you expect...This site is a solution for you so you can start to progressively enhance without fear!
The site is a provides examples using common layouts and component patterns, including …
The post Grid to Flex appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
JAMstack sites are often seen as being static. A more accurate mental model for them would be that they are sites which have the ability to be hosted statically. The difference might seem semantic, but thanks to the rise of many tools and services which simplify running a build and deploying to static hosting infrastructure, such sites can feel much fresher and dynamic than you might imagine, while still capable of being served from static hosting infrastructure, with all …
The post JAMstack Comments appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
Among the most popular suggestions on Smashing Magazine’s Content User Suggestions board is the need of learning more about the interaction and communication between designers and developers. There are probably several articles worth of very specific things that could be covered here, but I thought I would kick things off with a general post rounding up some experiences on the subject.
Given the wide range of skills held by the line-up at our upcoming SmashingConf Toronto — a fully live, no-slides-allowed event, I decided to solicit some feedback.
This is an extract from chapter 11 of Ashley Davis’s book Data Wrangling with JavaScript now available on the Manning Early Access Program. I absolutely love this idea as there is so much data visualization stuff on the web that relies on fully functioning client side JavaScript and potentially more API calls. It’s not nearly as robust, accessible, or syndicatable as it could be. If you bring that data visualization back to the server, you can bring progressive enhancement …
The post Server-Side Visualization With Nightmare appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
The Eclipse Foundation, which has taken over development of enterprise Java, plans two releases of the GlassFish Java application server this year, including one that will pass through Eclipse’s new enterprise Java specification process. The rollouts are the first steps in the foundation’s efforts to advance the enterprise Java platform, which, going forward, will emphasize microservices and cloud deployments.
GlassFish historically has served as a reference implementation of Java EE (Enterprise Edition}, which is being relabeled Jakarta EE. GlassFish will serve as the reference implementation of Jakarta EE as well. In the third quarter of this year, Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 will debut, becoming the first release of a project from the Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J) top-level project.
To read this article in full, please click here
One of the more useful elements of the modern developer environment is also one of the oldest development tools. Originally developed as part of YACC (Yet Another Compiler Compiler), the first linter was the equivalent of a grammar checker for C code. Taking its name from the bits of loose fluff found in wool, Lint highlighted errors, bugs, and problematic code.
Lint everything
Over the years, it gave its name to a whole menagerie of linting tools, mainly focused on the C and C++ worlds, but with versions for other languages and programming models. A well-designed linter runs through your code before compilation so you can correct errors and optimize it. A modern linter is an add-on to a compiler (though many modern compilers, especially tools such as .Net’s Roslyn, offer linting features as part of multistage operation), run separately to highlight many classes of possible problems with code, including uninitialized variables, poor formatting, and license issues. Such linters can even help refactor your code.
To read this article in full, please click here
Everybody loves speaking about successes, but nobody can succeed without failing big time along the way. It’s through mistakes that we grow and get smarter. So for the upcoming SmashingConf Freiburg 2018 (Sept. 10–11), we want to put these stories into focus for a change and explore practical techniques and strategies learned in real projects — the hard way. Aarron Walter, Josh Clark, Tammy Everts, Morten Rand-Hendriksen & many others. Sept 10–11.
If you think an event-driven architecture isn’t for you, think again: you might be missing out on useful design patterns that will future-proof your applications.
In the past few years, there has been an increase in popularity of event-driven architectures: more conference talks, blog posts, Slack discussions, and tweets on the subject. While event-driven architectures are not a new concept, they are especially well suited to recent trends in software engineering, including cloud computing, microservices, and scaling by building flexible, distributed systems, which explains why they are becoming more popular.
Event-driven architecture is the idea that one should design software starting with events, things that happen in the real-world and have real business meaning, and that these events should be the central concept in the architecture. Data is front-and-center, and components create events, handle events and send events to each other. There are several software design patterns that are particularly suited for event-driven architectures, such as event notification, event-carried state, and event sourcing.
To read this article in full, please click here
Some of the most inspiring examples I’ve seen of front-end development have involved some sort of page transitions that look slick like they do in mobile apps. However, even though the imagination for these types of interactions seem to abound, their presence on actual sites that I visit do not. There are a number of ways to accomplish these types of movement!
Here’s what we’ll be building:
Demo Site
GitHub Repo
We’ll build out the simplest possible distillation of these …
The post Native-Like Animations for Page Transitions on the Web appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
Good products are the result of a continual effort in research and design. And, as it usually turns out, our designs don’t solve the problems they were meant to right away. It’s always about constant improvement and iteration.
I have a client called Design Cafe (let’s call it DC). It’s an innovative interior design shop founded by a couple of very talented architects. They produce bespoke designs for the Indian market and sell them online.
F# is a strongly typed, functional-first programming language that lets you solve complex problems by writing simple code. Based on ML and built on the .NET Framework, F# offers good interoperability, portability, and run-time speed, as well as the “Five Cs”—conciseness, convenience, correctness, concurrency, and completeness.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)
Azure Search is a powerful search service available in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Azure Search provides excellent support for indexing and querying data while at the same time shielding you from the intricacies of deployment, management, and search algorithms.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)
Implementing responsive email design can be a bit of a drag. Building responsive emails isn’t simple at all, it is like taking a time machine back to 2001 when we were all coding website layouts in tables using Dreamweaver and Fireworks.
But there's hope! We have tools available that can make building email much easier and more like coding a modern site. Let’s take a look at a couple of different frameworks that set out to simplify things for us.…
The post Choosing a Responsive Email Framework: MJML vs. Foundation for Emails appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
Google’s mobile-first indexing is here. Well, for some websites anyway. For the rest of us, it will be here soon enough, and our websites need to be in tip-top shape if we don’t want search rankings to be adversely affected by the change.
That said, responsive web design is nothing new. We’ve been creating custom mobile user experiences for years now, so most of our websites should be well poised to take this on… right?
The beginning of April is GitHub mark 10 years since it launched out of private beta. Though the San Francisco-based code repository startup is celebrating April 2018 as its official birthday, October 2017 is the company’s unofficial 10th anniversary; a basic default Rails app import for building GitHub in 2007 was the company’s first Git commit.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)
It’s all the rage these days: moving on-premises data to the cloud. But should you use cloud-native databases or databases that run both in the cloud and on-premises?
There are trade-offs between the cloud-native (meaning “cloud-only”) and dual cloud/on-premises options, mostly involving cost and operational efficiency.
Of course, the issue of which database can be a contentious one. Many IT organizations have used a specific enterprise database for years, and they’re not about to give up that database in the cloud. The good news: Your favorite on-premises database runs in the cloud as well.
To read this article in full, please click here
Now that Oracle has released Java Development Kit 10, the next version, JDK 11, is just around the corner. Due in September 2018 as part of Oracle’s new six-month release cadence for the standard edition of Java, Version 11 has just a handful of announced features so far.
Java 11 is also set to lose some capabilities through the removal of CORBA and Java EE (recently renamed Jakarta EE) modules, as well as the removal of JavaFX.
To read this article in full, please click here
If you have been in the React ecosystem for a while, there is a possibility that you have heard about Higher Order Components. Let’s look at a simple implementation while also trying to explain the core idea. From here you should get a good idea of how they work and even put them to use.
Why Higher-Order Components?
As you build React applications, you will run into situations where you want to share the same functionality across multiple components…
The post What are Higher-Order Components in React? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
This is an interesting read on the current state of scrollbars and how to control their behavior across operating systems and browsers. The post also highlights a bunch of stuff I didn’t know about, like Element.scrollIntoView() and the scroll-behavior CSS property.
My favorite part of all though? It has to be this bit:
In the modern web, relying heavily on custom JavaScript to achieve identical behavior for all clients is no longer justified: the whole idea of “cross-browser compatibility” is …
The post Scroll to the Future appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
(This is a sponsored post.)
Huge thanks to Kinsta for sponsoring CSS-Tricks this week! We're big fans of WordPress around here, and know some of you out there are too. So this might come of interest: Kinsta is WordPress hosting that runs on Google Cloud Platform. And in fact, it's officially recommended by Google Cloud for fully-managed WordPress hosting.
What does that matter? Well, when you go with a cloud host you're entering a new realm of reliability. For …
The post Kinsta appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
React Native is a young technology, already gaining popularity among developers. It is a great option for smooth, fast, and efficient mobile app development. High-performance rates for mobile environments, code reuse, and a strong community: These are just some of the benefits React Native provides.
In this guide, I will share some insights about the high-level capabilities of React Native and the products you can develop with it in a short period of time.
Congratulations on finishing your four-year computer science degree in two years with no actual practical software development experience or attending your coding bootcamp!
But there are a few more things you should know. And there are a few more things you should read.
- Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition. You learned how to code and all, but did you learn when to code and what to code? Moreover, there are a number of things that you should probably know (like why Booleans may not make great status variables). While there is some dust even on the second edition, there is gold here.
- The Mythical Man-Month. Most problems that will happen on your first professional software project are explained in this book. Read it before your first job, but don’t quote it to people (enough people do that, and it just comes off as smug). I suppose you could also just read the complete works of Dilbert, but MMM is shorter.
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. This book ages pretty well. Actually, it takes off where Code Complete ends. It is also much shorter.
- Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. The so-called Gang of Four book helps you learn the metapatterns of programming. This will save you from inventing your own whatever framework because you’ll realize that you have invented nothing new. It also will help you think about things in the right way.
- Extreme Programming Explained. Whether they do XP on the job or some chaotic adaptation of scrum that smells awfully waterfally (like most companies), this book teaches you how software development should probably work if anyone were motivated to do it right. Don’t worry, very few companies actually do pair programming. Though I admit it is probably good for you, if you don’t drive the other person to murder.
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Your dream of creating anything from scratch is likely to be daunted. Almost everything has legacy code. You’ll spend most of your career dealing with crap code created by people who write like they just finished code camp (no offense)—or stuff created by “the offshore team” (which consists of the people who just finished the two-year version of a four-year computer science program). You’ll rarely be given enough time to rewrite it. Instead, learn how to refactor it.
- UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, Third Edition. A good 70 percent of UML was a useless farce to sell overpriced clunky tools (looking at you, Rational Rose). Don’t learn UML to go around annoying people with useless class diagrams. Do learn the basics so you can read a sequence diagram and learn to think this way.
Please for the love of all that is good and right, crack some books. And now that you’ve learned to “code,” actually learn to develop software before bestowing your wonders upon the rest of us. (And don’t forget to get off of my lawn!)
To read this article in full, please click here
Stencil, an open source compiler for building web components and progressive web apps (PWAs), is due to move to a beta release in May, with a Version 1.0 production release expected in midsummer.
Developed by tools builder Ionic, Stencil enables development of reusable web components that work across frameworks. It combines concepts of popular frameworks into a compile-time rather than runtime tool. Web components are generated that run in any browser supporting the Custom Elements specification. These components can run in frameworks such as Angular and React or without a framework. The components are plain HTML elements. Also, Stencil can be used as a drop-in replacement for traditional front-end frameworks. Additionally, Stencil can generate components with polyfills available for browsers that need them.
To read this article in full, please click here
There are hundreds of tech-heavy database reviews out there, but they don’t always give clear guidance on the first step in selecting a database: choosing the best general type for a specific application. All databases are not created equal. Each has specific strengths and weaknesses. While it’s true that workarounds exist to make a favorite database work for most projects, using those tricks adds unnecessary complexity.
Before considering a specific database, take some time to think about what type would best support the project at hand. The question goes deeper than “SQL vs. NoSQL.” Read on for a rundown of the most common database types, the relative merits of each, and how to tell which is the best fit.
To read this article in full, please click here
VuePress is a new tool from Vue creator Evan You that spins up Vue projects that are more on the side of websites based on content and markup than progressive web applications and does it with a few strokes of the command line.
We talk a lot about Vue around here, from a five-part series on getting started with it to a detailed implementation of a serverless checkout cart
But, like anything new, even the basics of getting started can …
The post VuePress Static Site Generator appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
We asked the Smashing community what podcasts they listened to, aiming to compile a shortlist of current podcasts for web designers and developers. We had what can only be called a very strong response — both in number and in passion.
First, we winnowed out the podcasts that were on a broader theme (e.g. creativity, mentoring, leadership), on a narrower theme (e.g. on one specific WordPress theme) or on a completely different theme (e.
Oracle has delivered a production release of GraalVM, a universal virtual machine for running applications written in any of many languages.
The technology has served as a just-in-time compiler and polyglot runtime for the JVM. GraalVM Version 1.0 provides high performance for individual languages as well as interoperability with no overhead in building polyglot applications, Oracle said.
It can run JVM languages and JavaScript, including Node.js, as well as LLVM bitcode and—in experimental mode—Ruby, R, and Python. Other languages supported on GraalVM include:
To read this article in full, please click here
If there is any language that is a known and proven quantity for developers, it’s Java. Enterprise developers, web developers, mobile developers, and plenty of others besides, have made Java ubiquitous and contributed to the massive culture of support around Java.
What’s more, the Java runtime, or Java Virtual Machine (JVM), has become a software ecosystem all its own. In addition to Java, a great many other languages have leveraged the Java Virtual Machine to become powerful and valuable software development tools in their own right.
Using the JVM as a runtime brings with it several benefits. The JVM has been refined over multiple decades, and can yield high performance when used well. Applications written in different languages on the JVM can share libraries and operate on the same data structures, while programmers take advantage of different language features.
To read this article in full, please click here
Advertise here via BSA
One of the typical tasks almost each site creator eventually needs to solve is a requirement to display huge amounts of data to the site visitors in a readable and interactive manner. A classic solution is organising the data in a table. If you deal with data management on your website, you should know about […]
The post Improving your WordPress tables with the #1 plugin for tables and charts appeared first on WebAppers.
Sponsors
Professional Web Icons for Your Websites and Applications
Perhaps the least understood component of secondary storage strategy, archive has become a necessity for modern digital enterprises with petabytes of data and billions of files.
So, what exactly is archive, and why is it so important?
Archiving data involves moving data that is no longer frequently accessed off primary systems for long-term retention.
The most apparent benefit of archiving data is to save precious space on expensive primary NAS or to retain data for regulatory compliance, but archiving can reap long-term benefits for your business as well. For example, archiving the results of scientific experiments that would be costly to replicate can be extremely valuable later for future studies.
To read this article in full, please click here
Conversational user interfaces are a focus for many businesses as they are becoming more widely adopted. Colossal brands like Amazon and Google are investing in the technology around voice interfaces, which is fueling the demand. As a result, these interfaces are becoming more advanced every day, as a myriad of industries are recognizing the value of providing users with conversational voice interfaces.
It comes as no surprise that 2017 saw significant growth in artificial intelligence and machine learning for everyday use. Today, we are seeing the use of AI in apps everywhere, in almost every industry. Here’s how I see voice technology playing out in the next few years.
To read this article in full, please click here
Most design and product teams have some type of persona document. Theoretically, personas help us better understand our users and meet their needs. The idea is that codifying what we’ve learned about distinct groups of users helps us make better design decisions. Referring to these documents ourselves and sharing them with non-design team members and external stakeholders should ultimately lead to a user experience more closely aligned with what real users actually need.
If we’re to build a massively scalable internet of things, we’re going to need tools that can handle hundreds of thousands of devices and a massive throughput of data. That’s hard to deliver with on-premises systems, but one that’s eminently suited to the scale and scalability of the public cloud.
While there’s a Windows for IoT hardware, the heart of Microsoft’s IoT platform is its Azure cloud, with a suite of tools and services that can build massive scale industrial IoT applications. One key element of that suite is IoT Hub, a routing service that sits between your devices and gateways and your back-end cloud services.
Inside Azure IoT Hub
Azure IoT Hub manages messaging connections to and from your devices, either directly for devices with IP connectivity or via gateways for hardware that uses proprietary or low-power protocols. It sits in Azure, behind edge computing services, providing a management layer and the ability to ingest significant amounts of data from a large number of connected devices.
To read this article in full, please click here
Mozilla is developing an online IDE for the WebAssembly portable code format. The beta version is now available.
Called WebAssembly Studio, the IDE is intended to help developers learn and teach others about WebAssembly, which is also called Wasm. The code format promises to speed web application performance and has the support of major browser vendors, including Mozilla.
The features in WebAssembly Studio beta
The IDE project began in late 2017 when developers tried to merge two existing tools, WasmExplorer and WasmFiddle.
To read this article in full, please click here
An increasingly common question — now that people are using CSS Grid Layout in production — seems to be “What are the best practices?” The short answer to this question is to use the layout method as defined in the specification. The particular parts of the spec you choose to use, and indeed how you combine Grid with other layout methods such as Flexbox, is down to what works for the patterns you are trying to build and how you and your team want to work.
Microsoft's ASP.Net Core has already become a popular way to build high-performance, modern web applications that can run on Windows, Linux, or MacOS. One way it supports high performance of course is caching. Although ASP.Net Core doesn’t have an in-built Cache object, it provides support for several different types of caching including in-memory caching, distributed caching, and response caching.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)
Programmers love to sneer at the world of fashion where trends blow through like breezes. Skirt lengths rise and fall, pigments come and go, ties get fatter, then thinner. But in the world of technology, rigor, science, math, and precision rule over fad.
Hot: Renting
Not: Buying
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)
These days, it is one of the biggest challenges to think long-term. In a world where we live with devices that last only a few months or a few years maybe, where we buy stuff to throw it away only days or weeks later, the term ‘effort’ gains a new meaning.
Recently, I was reading an essay on ‘Yatnah’, ‘Effort’. I spent a lot of time outside in nature in the past weeks and created a small acre to grow some vegetables.
Known for its lack of a large standard library, JavaScript is set to gain a much more functional and larger standard library, under a third-party initiative happening outside the JavaScript standardization process. The library also will serve the Node.js server-side JavaScript runtime.
Called Stdlib, the open source project focuses on numerical and scientific computing applications, which itself shows how JavaScript is growing beyond its web development roots. Stdlib will offer a collection of libraries for mathematics, statistics, data processing, and streams, and it will offer many of the utilities expected from a standard library, its creators say.
To read this article in full, please click here
This article is for web developers who wish to spend less time testing the front end of their web applications but still want to be confident that every feature works fine. It will save you time by automating repetitive online tasks with Selenium WebDriver. You will find a step-by-step example for automating and testing the login function of WordPress, but you can also adapt the example for any other login form.
Advertise here via BSA
There is one thing web designers like about multipurpose WordPress themes. It is that they can be used to build virtually any type of website. It can be for a creative type, a small business, a corporation, or a cause. A counter-argument is that multipurpose is a “jack of all trades, master of none”. Nothing […]
The post Best Multipurpose WP Themes You Can Use in 2018 appeared first on WebAppers.
Sponsors
Professional Web Icons for Your Websites and Applications
Since iOS 5, Siri has helped iPhone users send messages, set reminders and look up restaurants with Apple’s apps. Starting in iOS 10, we have been able to use Siri in some of our own apps as well.
In order to use this functionality, your app must fit within Apple’s predefined Siri “domains and intents.” In this article, we’ll learn about what those are and see whether our apps can use them.
(This is a sponsored article.) In my previous article on Building UX Teams, I explored the rapidly growing need for UX teams as a result of the emergence of design as a wider business driver. As teams grow, so too does a need for leaders to nurture and guide them.
In my final article in this series on user experience design, I’ll explore the different characteristics of an effective UX leader, and provide some practical advice about growing into a leadership role.
There’s a trickling line of ones and zeros that disappears behind a large yellow tube. A bear pops out of the tube as a clawed paw starts pointing at my browser’s toolbar, and a headline appears, saying: “Start your bear-owsing!”
Between my awwing and oohing I forget what I wanted to browse.
Products like a VPN service rarely evoke endearment — or any other emotion, for that matter. It’s not their job, not what they were built to do.
You may not have heard of OpenSCG, but Amazon Web Services has. A week ago, AWS quietly acquired the PostgreSQL migration services company founded by PostgreSQL veteran Denis Lussier. While some PostgreSQL fans weren’t happy about the move, the OpenSCG acquisition is emblematic of a much larger move by AWS to serve a wide array of database needs.
To read this article in full, please click here
“Accessibility is solved at the design stage.” This is a phrase that Daniel Na and his team heard over and over again while attending a conference. To design for accessibility means to be inclusive to the needs of your users. This includes your target users, users outside of your target demographic, users with disabilities, and even users from different cultures and countries. Understanding those needs is the key to crafting better and more accessible experiences for them.
Advertise here via BSA
Beautiful web pages aren’t always enough to keep a visitor engaged. In fact, if a site’s UI and UX aren’t carefully designed, visitors aren’t apt to stay around for long. Consequently, there’s a huge and ever-growing demand for UX designers. Salaries that are in keeping with the demand make the thought of diving into UX […]
The post Try the most efficient UX/UI Tools in 2018 appeared first on WebAppers.
Sponsors
Professional Web Icons for Your Websites and Applications
In a connected world, real-time data pipelines power applications and insights, providing the digital infrastructure for active data. This helps data-driven companies understand how their customer base is behaving in the moment, especially when it involves live operations. With an ongoing pursuit of new digital growth opportunities, data leaders need to stay on top of these leading architectures.
A stereotypical real-time data pipeline might look as follows:
Real-Time Data Source > Message Queue > Database > Application
Data sources and applications can be unique to specific industries. Choices for message queues and databases apply horizontally and are the primary focus of this article.
To read this article in full, please click here