Dev News: Svelte 5, AI Bot for Android Studio, and GitHub Tools
Rich Harris offered a preview of Svelte 5 in a recent blog post and video. What’s new? Harris introduced a new way to handle reactivity in Svelte called Runes.
Reactivity is a programming concept in which data update based on its dependencies, as software engineer Tom Smykowski demonstrated in this blog post.
Some developers on Twitter have compared it to React’s hooks. Smykowski observed that each framework handles reactivity a little bit differently and compared Runes to Angular’s Signals and React’s use of an “explicit list of dependencies to handle fine-grained reactive updates.”
A release date for Svelte 5 has not been set, Harris added.
Google’s Release of Studio Bot to Android Studio
Google released its AI-powered coding assistant, Studio Bot, in the Android Studio canary build and made it available to more than 170 countries — although it’s still designed to be used in English. Studio Bot understands natural language and is so far just designed to be used in English.
“You can enter your questions in Studio Bot’s chat window ranging from very simple and open-ended ones to specific problems that you need help with,” the press release explained.
It remembers the context so that you can ask follow-up questions, e.g., “Can you give me the code for this in Kotlin” or “Can you show me how to do it in Compose.” Developers don’t need to send in source code to use Studio Bot.
“By default, Studio Bot’s responses are purely based on conversation history, and you control whether you want to share additional context or code for customized responses,” Google stated.
That said, Studio Bot is still a work in progress, so Google recommends validating its response before using it in a production app.
GitHub Launches Innovation Graph, Adds Atlassian Migration Support
GitHub on Thursday launched its GitHub Innovation Graph, an open data and insights platform on the global and local impact of developers.
The Innovation Graph includes longitudinal metrics on software development for economies around the world. The website and repository provides quarterly data dating back to 2020 on git pushes, developers, organizations, repositories, languages, licenses, topics, and economy collaborators. The platform offers a number of data visualizations, and the repository outlines the methodology. Data for each metric is available to download.
“In research commissioned by GitHub, consultancy Tattle found that researchers in the international development, public policy, and economics fields were interested in using GitHub data but faced many barriers in obtaining and using that data,” the company said in a news release. “We intend for the Innovation Graph to lower those barriers. Researchers in other fields will also benefit from convenient, aggregated data that may have previously required third-party data providers if it was available at all.”
Graph created by GitHub Innovation Graph
GitHub also announced this week its adding support for migrations to two tools: GitHub Enterprise Importer now supports customers using BitBucket Server and Bitbucket Data Center, and GitHub Actions Importer can now help developers pivot off Atlassian’s CI/CD products.
GitHub Actions Importer eliminates the manual process of CI migrations and automates the evaluation and testing of the CI migration of nearly a quarter million pipelines, the company said in a statement. GitHub Actions Importer allows developers to move from any of Atlassian’s CI/CD products — Bitbucket, Bamboo Server, and Bamboo Data Center — to GitHub Actions. After Feb. 15, 2024, Atlassian will no longer offer technical support, security updates or vulnerability fixes for their Server products like Bitbucket Server and Bamboo Server, according to GitHub.
DockerCon 2023 Runs Oct. 3-5
DockerCon is back with both live and virtual options this year Oct. 3-5. The live conference is at the MagicBox in Los Angeles and runs Wednesday and Thursday. Tuesday is a workshop day, which is an additional add-on. The virtual ticket includes the live keynotes and select educational sessions.
Topics to be covered during the conference include:
- Web Application
- Web Development
- Building and Deploying Applications
- Secure Software Delivery
- Innovation and Agility
- Open Source
- Emerging Trends
Vercel Launches Serverless Storage System
On Monday, frontend cloud development platform Vercel launched a public beta of Vercel Blob, its serverless storage system.
Blob stands for binary large objects and are typically images, audio or other multimedia objects. Sometimes binary executable code is stored as a blob as well. Vercel Blob allows Vercel Pro users to store and retrieve any file with an intuitive, promise-based API.
Designed for the JavaScript and TypeScript frameworks, Vercel Blob allows developers to store and retrieve any file. During its four-month private beta, Vercel created 50,000 blob stores. Users with a Vercel account can have multiple blob stores in a project. Also, each blob store can be accessed by multiple Vercel projects. Vercel Blob URLs are publicly accessible, created with an unguessable random ID, and immutable.
There are plans to support making a Blob private in an upcoming release
Free Software Development Course, Coding Labs
LinkedIn Learning is collaborating with Coder Pad to offer 33 new software development courses and interactive coding exercises for free through Dec. 18. Coders can learn about six languages — Python, JavaScript, Go, SQL, Java and C++. There are six new programming essential courses, which covers the basics of a language, as well as 18 new coding labs or practice environments to hone programming skills in these languages, and nine new advanced courses focused primarily on advanced techniques in the six languages, plus one course on building a generative language model from scratch.
Gradle Changes Name
Developer build tool Gradle Enterprise will now be called Develocity. The reason for this name change is that Gradle, Inc., found the original name created a misconception that Gradle Enterprise was only for the Gradle Build Tool when it actually supports both the Gradle Build Tool and the Apache Maven build system.
The company also recently announced that Develocity supports the Bazel build system, which is an open source project hosted by Google. The company also released beta-level support for sbt, the open source build system popular with the Scala language developer community. The roadmap for Develocity includes plans to support additional software development ecosystems.
