Languages and standards - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Microsoft, Google, Mozilla team to build a faster Web

  Web apps and pages may soon get a speed boost to rival the performance of native desktop and mobile applications, thanks to a new standards initiative from Microsoft, Google and Mozilla.

• Five things Apple is doing to please developers

  Apple had lots to offer developers at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. Headline improvements included a new version of the soon to be open sourced Swift programming language and upgraded frameworks for creating more advanced Watch apps.

• Amazon's Go SDK one step closer with preview release

  Amazon Web Services has announced the first Developer Preview of its SDK for the Go programming language, giving developers who want to integrate cloud services in their apps more choice.

• New query language could turn log files into business insights

  IT departments have long relied on log data to help keep systems up and running, but they're not the only ones who can benefit from these vast stores of information. A new analytics language from Logentries could help managers tap log data to gain insights about their business.
  

• Instagram engineer delves into emoji madness

  Emojis: Kids may love their simplicity, but programmers will loathe their complexities.

• Red Hat broadens programming language support

  Potentially making work easier for system administrators, Red Hat has updated its development packages to support running multiple versions of the same programming language on its flagship enterprise operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

• MIT's Picture language could be worth a thousand lines of code

  Now that machine-learning algorithms are moving into mainstream computing, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is preparing a way to make it easier to use the technique in everyday programming.

• Etsy borrows some HipHop help from Facebook

  After borrowing Facebook open source code for running PHP programs more efficiently, Etsy won't need to grow its data center footprint this year, saving it from a significant expense.

• HP extends R programming language for big data use

  Hewlett-Packard has devised a way to run programs written in the R statistical programming language against data sets that span more than one server, potentially paving the way for large-scale, real-time predictive analytics.

• Microsoft, IBM get behind stewardship of Node.js Web runtime platform

  Microsoft, IBM, and the Linux Foundation are among a number of organizations joining an initiative to manage Node.js, a popular runtime software that provides interactive Web interfaces for users.

• Standards bodies join to create better geolocation Web data

  From ordering pizza online to pinpointing the exact location of a breaking news story, an overwhelming portion of data on the Web has geographic elements. Yet for Web developers, wrangling the most value from geospatial information remains an arduous task.

• MIT unifies Web development in a single, speedy new language

  Building a moderately complex Web page requires understanding a whole stack of technologies, from HTML to JavaScript. Now a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has wrapped these technologies into a single language that could streamline development, speed up performance and better secure Web sites.

• Facebook's alternative PHP engine attracts Web service providers

  Some fairly large Internet services are pressing into production Facebook's open-source PHP runtime engine after being impressed with the performance metrics for the alternative to the ubiquitous open-source PHP package used across the Web.

• Amazon launches Lambda, an event-driven compute service

  Continuing to roll out new compute services at an impressive clip, Amazon Web Services has introduced a way for programmers to trigger operations in their AWS deployments without running a full virtual machine, potentially reducing maintenance work and cost.

• Microsoft ramps up 'devops' capabilities for developers

  Recognizing that many organizations are under competitive pressure to evolve their applications ever more quickly, Microsoft has been updating its programming tools to accommodate fast paced "devops"-style development environments.