Hello!

Here are the most important things happening in the coding world this month:

Popular Technology Releases

July marked releases for some of the most popular languages and technologies. ECMAScript 8, the official specification for JavaScript, made its yearly release official (read: what’s New in ES2017). In addition, Python 3.6.2, Elixir 1.5 and Rust 1.19 were released. Redis, the popular cache and data store, had a major version release with 4.0.

Flash End of Life in 2020

Flash was once a staple for managing multimedia on the web, but Adobe has recently announced that they plan to remove support for the product in 2020. The use of flash has started to be viewed as more of an anti-pattern in web development given its issues with security vulnerabilities and the widespread adoption and support for HTML5 by engineers and major tech companies including Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Gitter is Open Source!

Gitter, the popular chat application developed for open source projects, has been open sourced itself. Gitter has seen its user base steadily grow and currently powers the community for a large number of projects. Anyone is now able to build on top of the source code. GitLab purchased Gitter in March of 2017 with the promise of open sourcing it shortly after.

NPX is now Packaged with NPM

npx is now packaged by default with npm. Following the 5.2.0 release, developers can now take advantage of the tool to help round out the package management experience. The same way npm makes it super easy to install and manage dependencies, npx is meant to make it easy to use CLI tools and other executables hosted on the registry as well. It greatly simplifies a number of things that, until now, required a bit of ceremony to do with plain npm.

Open Container Initiative Specifications 1.0 Released

The adoption of containers in software development has exploded at a rapid pace. In an effort to standardize the container ecosystem, the Open Container Initiative Specifications 1.0 was released. This provides foundation that will ensure any images and tooling built against this release will receive wide support well into the future. The specification has support from the major players in the container space including Docker and Google.

React 16 Beta

React 16 beta has been released. This is the first React release that ships with a rewrite of the React core (previously codenamed “Fiber”). This rewrite removes old internal abstractions that didn’t age well and hindered internal changes. The release will also enable the React team to start experimenting with asynchronous rendering of components for better perceived performance. It’ll also include error boundaries which enable components to fail more gracefully and display a backup UI as opposed to crashing the entire application. React 16 beta can be installed using the @next tag when you npm install.

That’s all we have for you this month. Until next time!