React knowledge ‘big opportunity’ for marketable developers, argues HackerRank

Organisations continue to look for expertise in JavaScript and Java above everything else – yet a skills gap is apparent when it comes to frameworks.

That is the key analysis from a new report by technical recruiter HackerRank. The report, titled the 2018 Developer Skills Report and which polled almost 40,000 developers, found React to have the biggest disparity; 19% of developers said they knew it, while 33% of companies require it.

The report argues that knowing React...

29 January 2018 | Development Tools

Stack Overflow report examines ‘brutal’ lifecycle of JavaScript frameworks

Developers on Stack Overflow continue to be more interested in jQuery than other JavaScript frameworks according to new data analysis – although adding the share for market voice as new frameworks come in is “brutal.” The report was released days after a three-part report from NPM, software registry and package manager for JavaScript, which argued jQuery ‘remains hugely popular but decreasingly so.’ Any cliché normally written about JavaScript frameworks and buses aside, the Stack...

15 January 2018 | Development Tools

React most popular front-end JavaScript framework with Preact fastest growing

According to figures from NPM, software registry and package manager for JavaScript, React remains by a distance the most popular front-end JavaScript framework, with Angular in second place.

The findings come from NPM’s State of JavaScript Frameworks 2017 report, with the first part assessing the front-end frameworks and the second examining the growth of the React ecosystem. As of the end of last year, the Facebook-curated React makes up approximately 0.05% of the 13 billion...

11 January 2018 | Development Tools

C named as TIOBE’s 2017 programming language of the year

Sometimes the old ones are the best ones: C has been named as TIOBE’s programming language of 2017, nine years after its most recent triumph.

The language remains at #2 in the January 2018 rankings, behind Java and ahead of C++ – with no change from January 2017’s index – but came out on top for language of the year because of its yearly growth of 1.69%. Runners up were Python (1.21% growth) and Erlang (0.98%).

TIOBE argues that the reason for C’s...

8 January 2018 | Java

Android Studio 3.0 brings treats like Kotlin, Java 8, and Instant Apps

Google isn’t waiting for Halloween and has begun handing out the sweet treats early with the stable release of Android Studio 3. We first heard of Google’s intention to bake Kotlin support into Android Studio back in May during its annual IO developer conference. Fast-forward five months and Google is making good on its promise. Much like Swift is to iOS, Kotlin is to Android. The language’s development lead, Andrey Breslav, has said that Kotlin is designed to be an industrial-strength...

27 October 2017 | Android

Microsoft upgrades and open sources Java debugger for Visual Studio Code

After receiving numerous constructive feedback and suggestions from Java developers, Microsoft has open sourced the Java debugger extension for Visual Studio Code and backend Java Debug Server along with accumulating some feature improvements and bug fixes.

On the Visual Studio Code Marketplace, the Java debugger extension has been installed over 56,000 times and has received a perfect 5.0 rating from seven developers.

A new feature added to the tool will allow developers to...

26 October 2017 | Development Tools

Report discusses how Java apps are susceptible to widespread attacks from known security defects

A recently released study conducted by CA Veracode has found that the majority of Java applications contain at least one vulnerable component, making them predisposed to widespread attacks.

The research, titled “2017 State of Software Security Report” - which involved CA Veracode’s base of more than 1,400 customers – revealed that less than 28% of companies conduct regular composition analysis to understand which components are built into their...

19 October 2017 | Hacking & Security

‘Encouraging’ study examines static typing and quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript

Are you a proponent of static typing or dynamic typing in JavaScript, or indeed another language? A new study from researchers at University College London (UCL), alongside Microsoft, put a couple of products to the test – with pretty solid results.

The researchers tested Flow, Facebook’s static type system, and TypeScript – from Microsoft, of course – and found that, at a conservative estimate, each product can spot approximately 15% of bugs which would...

26 September 2017 | Java

Skype introduces real-time code editor to help ease technical interview burdens

If you have an off-site technical interview coming up, the last thing you want to be thinking about – never mind your knowledge and the pressure of the situation anyway – is how the technology you will be using will stand up.

Skype has launched a new preview feature which aims to help technical interviews be conducted more seamlessly.

The feature enables a video call to be placed on top of a code editor, meaning interviewers and their prospective candidates do not...

31 August 2017 | Development Tools

Python slinks past C, Java and C++ to top IEEE 2017 language list

Python has topped the charts as the top programming language of 2017, according to the latest ranking from IEEE Spectrum.

The language, which continues to grow in popularity having been one of the highest risers in the most recent Stack Overflow survey, got the benchmark score of 100, with C (99.7), Java (99.5) and C++ (97.1) trailing close behind. C#, R, JavaScript, PHP, Go, and Swift completed the top 10.

No new languages appeared in the full list of 48 for the second year...

31 July 2017 | Java