Python slithers up Amazon’s Beanstalk
Python has become the newest language welcomed into the Amazon’s cloud fold, through the Amazon Web Services' Elastic Beanstalk.
The cloud giant today announced that Python applications are now supported on Elastic Beanstalk – along with PHP, Java and Microsoft’s family .NET.
The news smooths the way for the DJango and Flask rapid and light-weight application development frameworks for Python apps to get an easier Amazon fluffing.
Elastic Beanstalk automatically deploys applications by taking care of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling and health monitoring. Read more...
Oracle lowers the flag on Fortress language project
Oracle is shuttering the long-running Fortress programming language research project, in the database giant's latest move to divest itself of the less-profitable pieces of Sun Microsystems' software portfolio.
"After working nearly a decade on the design, development, and implementation of the Fortress programming language, the Oracle Labs Programming Language Research Group is now winding down the Fortress project," writes Guy Steele of the Oracle Labs programming language research group.
Fortress is an experimental programming language designed to make it easier to write software for modern, highly parallel computing environments. Its early research was funded in part by the same DARPA high-performance computing project that produced the Chapel and X10 languages.
Its design was influenced by Fortran, Java, and many other languages – and it runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) – but Fortress has a unique syntax that resembles mathematical notation, the native language of computer science. Read more...
Apple’s popularity boosts Objective-C language past C++
Thanks to the popularity of Apple's iPad and iPhone mobile devices, the Objective-C language has overtaken C++ in Tiobe's monthly assessment of programming language popularity.
Objective-C, the language used for developing applications to run on Apple's mobile devices, was ranked the third most-popular language in the July edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, followed by C++ in fourth place. Released this week, the index has Objective-C used by 9.335 percent of developers and C++ used by 9.118 percent. The two languages swap rankings from last month, when C++ was used by 9.358 percent of developers and Objective-C by 9.094 percent. Read more...
Java tops C in language popularity assessment — but not by much
Java is barely hanging on to its ranking as the most popular programming language, edging out C in this month's Tiobe index of programming language popularity.
Released on Sunday, the February Tiobe Community Programming Index had Java being used by 17.05 percent of developers. A year ago, 18.48 percent of developers used it, while 17.48 percent of developers used Java a month ago. C was slotted right behind Java, used by 16.52 percent of developers in the latest release of the index -- up from 14.98 percent the same time last year, but down from the 16.98 percent using it in last month's index. Read more...
Microsoft previews compiler-as-a-service software
Microsoft will release a CTP (Community Technology Preview) of a new type of compiler its researchers have been building, code-named Project Roslyn, the company executive overseeing the C# programming language announced Thursday.
"This project is about revising what compilers do," said Anders Hejlsberg in a talk at Microsoft's Build conference, being held this week in Anaheim, Calif. "[It] is about opening the compiler and making all that information available so [the developer] can harness all of this knowledge," he said.
Roslyn is a compiler for C3 and Visual Basic with a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that developers can use to fine-tune their code. It resembles a model developed by Miguel de Icaza's Mono Project, in which the information the compiler generates about a program can be reused as a library. Read more...
Kotlin project adds another language option to JVM
Just when it seemed like developers already had a plethora of language options on the Java Virtual Machine, JetBrains with Project Kotlin is readying a general-purpose statically typed language for the JVM that is geared to performance-critical applications. Kotlin was revealed last month at the JVM Language Summit in Silicon Valley, and JetBrains is seeking feedback on it, with documentation accessible at the Kotlin website.
InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently interviewed Dmitry Jemerov, JetBrains development lead, to discuss Kotlin and why the company is working on it. Although he is not personally involved in design of the language, Jemerov is involved in discussions on the language. Read more...
Java 8 gears up for the cloud
Now that Java 7 SE (Standard Edition) has officially been released, Oracle and members of the JCP (Java Community Process) have started mulling over what features to include in the next version of the programming language, Java SE 8. On the agenda for this new release: engineering Java for the cloud.
"Java 8 is supposed to set the scene for the cloud, for a wider deployment arena," said Mark Little, senior director of engineering for Red Hat's middleware business, as well as Red Hat's primary liaison for the JCP. Oracle left out many of the advanced features planned for Java 7 in order not to further delay the release, he noted. Those releases may very well be included in Java 8. Read more...