It provides a unified framework for policy creation and management across multiple clouds, simplifies policy writing, and supports popular authorization models such as role-based and attribute-based access control. Additionally, AWS has adopted a verification-guided development process to ensure the security and safety of Cedar.

The open-sourcing of the project also includes the Cedar language specification and SDK which offers libraries for authoring and validating policies and authorizing access requests. 

Amazon Verified Permissions uses Cedar to allow you to manage fine-grained permissions in your custom applications. With Amazon Verified Permissions, you can store Cedar policies centrally, have low latency with millisecond processing, and audit permissions across different applications. 

The open-source libraries of Cedar allow users to test and validate policies on their own computers before deploying them with Amazon Verified Permissions. This makes it possible to use Cedar to run applications not connected to the network, allowing users to customize the libraries to meet their needs.

Additional details on the project are available here. 

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With this, Flutter has been tailored specifically for Windows applications, combining a Dart framework and C++ engine. Additionally, the Flutter engine is hosted on an embedded layer that allows for communication between Windows and Flutter. 

Flutter coordinates with Windows to deal with things such as window resizing and DPI changes, as well as working with inputs such as keyboard and mouse, in addition to touch screen capabilities already built in.

For more details, read more.

Python in VS Code February 2022 release 

Microsoft revealed that the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code includes several new features, including: 

• Smart selection
• Folding support
• Improvements to the Python interpreters list
• Improvements when using Anaconda

With Smart selection via Pylance, selecting Python Code using the keyboard requires fewer key presses. This comes as a highly requested update, defining the users’ selection range by considering their own code structure and heuristics. 

Developers are also enabled to expand their code selection with Shift+Alt+Right Arrow and shrink it with Shift+Alt+Left Arrow. See here for more information. 

Apache weekly update

For the week ending on February 4, 2022, 303 Apache Committers altered 9,625,849 lines of code over 3,255 commits. The top five contributors of the week are Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Claus Ibsen, Sebastian Bazley, Guillaume Nodet, and Eric Milles.

There have also been several project updates, including the retirement of Apache Ambari and Apache Usergrid. This decision came from Apache committers and was due to general inactivity. 

In addition, users of Apache Superset up to and including 1.3.2 should upgrade to version 1.4.0 or higher as a password leak has been detected for authenticated users. This leak was found and reported by Cesar Santos. 

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Appian Process Mining brings users a no-code module that works to simplify the preparation and transformation of key enterprise data. Additionally, pre-built process packages with tools such as mapping and dashboards help to accelerate process mining time-to-value.

This release offers users the ability to

• Identify bottlenecks 
• Improve performance and results
• Achieve continuous optimization
• Focus on insights and minimize data preparation

Microsoft releases TypeScript 4.6 beta

The team at Microsoft recently announced the beta release of TypeScript 4.6. In order to get started using the beta, interested users can get it through NuGet or use npm with the command npm install typescript@beta. 

TypeScript 4.6 in beta brings users several new features, including 

• Allowing code in constructions before super ()
• Improved recursion depth checks
• Indexed access interface improvements 
• Control flow analysis for dependent parameters 
• More syntax and binding errors in JavaScript 
• TypeScript trace analyzer

Fore more information on this beta release, visit here.

Soffos Inc. launches AI powered Q&A learning app

Soffos Inc., an organization dedicated to building educational technology solutions, today unveiled its new AI powered learning app, TestMe. The app is geared towards school and college students to help with exam prep as well as corporate training managers.

TestMe’s AI-driven algorithm reads the contents of any document the user uploads and then takes that information and generates open-ended quiz style questions. The app does not just offer multiple choice answers, it allows test takers to type or speak their own original answers to questions.

College students across the U.S. are now being invited to trial TestMe and it will be generally available internationally in 2022 for students, parents, and teachers. Those interested can sign up here.  

Apache weekly update

Over the last week, 339 Apache Committers changed 2,470,884 lines of code over 3,505 commits. The top 5 contributors are Gary Gregory, Claus Ibsen, Adam Kocoloski, Mark Thomas, and Tian Jiang.

Several updates were also made across Apache projects over the past week. These include 

• Apache APISIX Java Plugin Runner 0.2.0 released
• Apache Karaf runtime 4.2.15 and 4.3.6 released
• Apache NiFi 1.15.3 released
• Apache Flink 1.14.3 released
• Apache Geode 1.12.8, 1.13.7, and Kafka Connector 1.1.0 released

For a full list of project announcements, see here. 

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LitmusChaos is an open-source chaos engineering platform that helps teams identify weaknesses and potential outages in infrastructures by inducing chaos tests in a controlled way. 

“The CNCF ecosystem has helped us build a strong and vibrant community around Litmus,” said Uma Mukkara, maintainer of the Litmus project and CEO of ChaosNative. “We have received consistent feedback from users since the launch of 1.0 release last year, which helped us come up with a robust set of features and a stable platform for cloud native chaos engineering.”

Firefox 96 released

Firefox 96 was released today with changes to CSS, HTTP, APIs and more. 

The hwb() function for use as a CSS color value has been implemented and Firefox now provides support for the ‘color-scheme’ property. Also, cookies sent from the same domain but using different schemes (for example http or https) are now considered to be from different sites with respect to the cookie SameSite directive. 

The full list of changes that will affect developers is available here. 

CircleCI adds extensive free plan

CircleCI launched a new free plan to give teams access to more build minutes, larger resource classes, and the most popular features that were formerly only available on paid plans. 

The new free plan includes up to 6,000 build minutes per month, unlimited users, free resource classes on Docker, Linux, and Windows, and more. 

“CircleCI is built to scale along with you. As you build on CircleCI and start to see the impact of the speed, flexibility, and power we bring your team, we have flexible, usage-based plans to support your team’s unique needs,” AJ Joshi, chief product officer at CircleCI, wrote in a blog post. 

Apache Flink 2.0 now available

The Apache Flink community announced the release of Flink ML 2.0.0. 

Flink ML is a library that provides APIs and infrastructure for building stream-batch unified machine learning algorithms, that can be easy-to-use and performant with (near-) real-time latency.

The new release includes a major refactor of the earlier Flink ML libraries and introduces major features that extend the Flink ML API and the iteration runtime.

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The acquisition will take place for $400 million in cash, subject to customary purchase price adjustments. Additionally, Alteryx will be establishing a retention pool of $75 million to be granted to the former employees of Trifacta.

This transaction is scheduled to close during the first quarter of 2022 and is subject to customary closing conditions. Up until the close of the transaction, each company will continue operating independently. For more information, see here.

QuickBase acquires MCF Technology Solutions 

QuickBase, provider of software that helps organizations see, connect, and control the elements of complex projects, recently announced that it will be acquiring MCF Technology Solutions (MCF). 

With this acquisition, QuickBase grows its service offering as well as extends its ability to meet market demand for software to support the global boom in building and infrastructure. Additionally, the acquisition will allow QuickBase to incorporate and offer MCF’s existing library of vertical-specific application templates on the QuickBase platform.

Apache weekly update

Over the past week, 280 Apache Committers changed 2,780,891 lines of code over 2,868 commits. The top 5 contributors include Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Gary Gregory, Mark Thomas, Harikrishna Patnala, and Claus Ibsen.

Apache also released several project updates, including: 

• Apache Avro 1.11.0
• Apache OFBiz 18.12.05
• Apache Camel 3.11.5
• Apache James 3.1.6
• Apache Guacamole 1.4.0
• Apache MINA FTP Server 1.1.2
• Apache Struts 2.5.28.3
• And Apache Portals 3.1.1

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The framework is a customizable pipeline that simplifies the implementation of prediction projects. Users only need to have the input data source, the logic to extract and process the data, and a Vertex AutoML model readily available along with the right feature list, and the Prediction Framework will be in charge of creating and deploying the required artifacts.

The framework was built to be hosted in the Google Cloud Platform and it utilizes all of the Cloud Functions in order to complete data processing. To start using the Prediction Framework, a configuration file must be prepared with a few environment variables. 

Flutter releases MIX

Flutter, the open-source UI software developer kit created by Google, recently announced MIX, a new tool for building design systems. The tool helps users build design systems expressively and easily by offering building blocks that help developers and designers create aesthetically pleasing and consistent user interfaces for their applications. 

MIX acts as a helper for easily maintaining a design language by utilizing the composition style of Flutter along with the advantage of inheritance for all attributes. To experience and get a feel for MIX, users should create a new Flutter project and integrate MIX with it. 

For more information on this release, visit here. 

Apache news roundup 

For the week ending on December 24, 2021, 317 Apache Committers changed 9,133,089 lines of code over 3,258 commits. The top 5 contributors are Gary Gregory, Harikrishna Patnala, Claus Ibsen, Duo Zhang, and Andi Huber. 

Additionally, Apache released Apache NiFi 1.15.2, Apache HBase 3.0.0-alpha-2, Apache Parquet 1.11.2 and 1.12.12, Apache Archiva 2.2.7, Apache JSPwiki 2.11.1, Apache Traffic Control 6.0.2, Apache Jackrabbit FileVault 3.5.8, Apache Tika 1.28 and 2.2.1, Apache Geode 1.12.7, 1.13.6, and 1.14.2, Apache Ignite 2.11.1, Apache PLC4X 0.9.1, Apache OFBitz 18.12.04, and several others.

For a full list of these releases, visit here.

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Adobe Developer App Builder provides users with a more unified experience of extending and customizing Adobe tools for developers. Additionally, it reduces the time it takes to create apps down to 15-30 minutes according to past Adobe hackathons.

To get started with App Builder, sign up for the free trial program, open to all enterprise customers. For more information on this release, visit here. 

ReactOS 0.4.14 release

The ReactOS team recently announced the release of version 0.4.14, which brings users improvements such as FreeLoader fixes, Shell features, kernel fixes, NetKVM VirtIO bringup, and support for NEC PC-9800. 

A key highlight of this release is the improvements made to the Shell component. With this, users gain access to the “Send To” implementation, a feature of Shell that can be used to send files or directories to a specific location. 

According to the ReactOS team, this comes as a maintenance release, meaning that version 0.4.14 does not contain the latest developments that were advertised in ReactOS’s 2021 blog and on social media. For the full details of this release, visit here.

Progress announces Fiddler Everywhere 3.0

Progress, a provider of products to develop, deploy, and manage high-impact applications, recently unveiled the newest release of its web debugging tool, Progress Fiddler Everywhere. With this, users gain support for HTTP/2, a revision of the HTTP network protocol. 

Fiddler Everywhere 3.0 allows users to easily debug high-performing applications across Windows, macOS, and Linux more securely, in less time, and with fewer resources than previously possible. 

Fiddler Everywhere 3.0 also brings users: 

• Support for WebSocket communication: Developers have access to information transferred to the server through a single ongoing connection.
• Improved advanced traffic filters: Developers can easily apply complex filtering to their sessions list and choose from Protocol, Status, IP, URL, Cookie, Body, and other values in addition to the Request and Response headers. 
• Faster onboarding for beginners and power users: On initial launch, developers are given instructions on how to configure their environment to capture HTTPS traffic. 

Apache weekly roundup 

Over the past week, 346 Apache Committers modified 1,957,663 lines of code over 3,699 commits. The top five contributors are Sebastian Bazley, Claus Ibsen, Owen Nichols, Gary Gregory, and Daniel Gruno.

Also, throughout the week Apache Druid 0.22.1, Apache Calcite Avatica 1.20.0, Apache NiFi 1.15.1, Apache Flink 1.14.2, 1.13.5, 1.12.7, and 1.11.6, Apache Archiva 2.2.6, Apache Jackrabbit 2.21.9, Apache Tika 2.2.0, Apache PDFBox 2.0.25, Apache Geode 1.12.6, 1.13.5, and 1.14.1, Apache OFBiz 18.12.03, Apache Fortress 2.0.7, Apache Camel 3.14.0, Apache Log4j 2.12 and 2.16.0, Apache Solr 8.11.1, Apache HttpComponents HttpAsyncClient 4.1.5, Apache JMeter 5.4.2, and Apache Struts 2.5.28 were all released.

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Red Hat OpenShift Data Science is a cloud service offering tailored for machine learning on Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform. With this, enterprises gain greater flexibility in selecting technologies to develop, test, and deploy machine learning models, while also removing the overhead that usually comes with running and maintaining a production platform. 

In addition, several members of Red Hat’s artificial intelligence and machine learning partner ecosystem are now pre-integrated into the user interface dashboard. This grants access to hardware and software acceleration solutions as well as tools to support the model operationalization lifecycle. 

Cortex raised $15 million in Series A

Cortex, a company that helps engineers build better software at scale, announced $15 million in Series A funding co-led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital. Technology investors, founders, and business leaders also participated in the financing round including Silicon Valley angel, Gokul Rajaram; co-founder and CEO of Front, Mathilde Collin; and CEO of Snyk, Peter McKay.

The Cortex platform brings its users several capabilities, such as Service Creation to allow developers to scaffold new services in minutes based on templates defined by the organization, Cortex Teams to help create high-performing engineering cultures by driving collective ownership of services, and Scorecards that allow teams to define standards for their services. 

Apache weekly update

This past week, 340 Apache Committers changed 4,175,400 lines of code over 3,102 commits. The top five contributors are Daniel Gruno, Christofer Dutz, Sebastian Rühl, Sebastian Bazley, and Claus Ibsen.

In addition, Apache Arrow 6.0.1, Apache Ozone 1.2.0, Apache Jackrabbit Oak 1.6.22, Apache Camel 3.13.0, Apache loTBD 0.12.3, Apache CloudStack 4.16.0.0, Apache SkyWalking Infra E2E 1.1.0, Apache Groovy 4.0.0 beta 2, Apache Lucene 8.11.0, Apache Solr 8.11.0, Operator v0.5.0, new versions of Apache Tomcat, Apache HttpComponents 5.1.2 GA, Apache Traffic Control, and Apache Struts 2.5.27 were released over the past week. 

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With the acquisition of CodeStream, New Relic gained several capabilities, including 

• the ability to pull requests from GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab 
• issue management from Jira, Trello, and other additional apps, 
• code discussion integrated with Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, and in-editor notifications.

In addition, New Relic has also been working with Microsoft in order to integrate New Relic CodeStream with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, GitHub, Azure, and Microsoft Teams. 

SambaNova announces GPT-powered language model

SambaNova announced the availability of the company’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) language model included in SambaNova’s Dataflow-as-a-service for language. This increases the capability of SambaNova’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) model with increased speed and accuracy.

With the addition of the GPT-powered language model, a full suite of NLP for production and deployment of language models has become available to users. The language model utilizes deep learning in order to create human-like text leveraging large amounts of data. SambaNova’s Dataflow-as-a-service GPT can be used for sentiment analysis, document classification, and information extraction.

To learn more, visit here.

Django 4.0 beta 1

Django today announced that Django 4.0 is now available in beta 1. This comes as a part of the second stage in the 4.0 release cycle and is an opportunity for users to try out the new updates and changes coming in Django 4.0.

Based on the current release schedule, a release candidate will come in another month with the final release to follow about two weeks after that, around Dec. 6. Django 4.0 in beta 1 is not for production use but as a way for the company to get feedback and manage bug fixes prior to the final release.

Find the beta package available for download here.

Apache weekly update 

Over the past week, 313 Apache committers changed 7,080,993 lines of code over 2,545 commits. The top five contributors are Claus Ibsen, Gary Gregory, Jarek Potiuk, Andi Huber, Andrea Cosentino, and Tamas Cservenak.

There were also several releases, including Apache Calcite 1.28.0, Apache DataFu 1.6.1, Apache XMLBeans 5.0.2, Apache Flink 1.13.3, Apache Storm 1.2.4, 2.1.1, and 2.2.1, Apache Ant 1.10.12, Apache Qpid Proton-J 0.33.10, JMS 1.3.0, Apache Skywalking CLI 0.9.0, Eyes 0.2.0, Apache Lucene 8.10.1, Apache Solr 8.10.1, and Apache HttpComponents Core 5.2 alpha2.

In addition, the Apache Month in Review for September 2021 is available here with video highlights here. The documentary on the ASF 1, “Trillions and Trillions Served” as well as “Apache Everywhere”, “Why Apache”, and “Apache Innovation” are available for viewing. With these, the presentations from ApacheCon Asia are also available on YouTube. 

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Microsoft also created a GitHub Project Board in order to keep track of the new workflow where interested users can follow along. The new feature workflow was inspired by the C# team’s current workflow and it leverages their implementation of discussions and proposals. 

The new workflow functions in seven steps, users begin by opening a discussion, next they open a new feature proposal, after a new proposal is opened, a member of the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit team will choose to be its champion, once the proposal is approved the user can start writing code, the next step is the pull request approval (pending documentation), after the documentation has been completed, it will be reviewed, approved, and merged by a member of the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit team, once the pull request is merged the users code will be officially added to the toolkit. 

Google giving away Flutter Apprentice for three months and hosting Flutter Apprentice Book Club

Google announced that for the next three months it will be giving away Razeware’s “Flutter Apprentice” book for free along with a book club to those interested in learning Flutter. The book is intended to build on mobile development fundamentals and it takes readers through their first fully-featured Flutter app.

Flutter Apprentice walks readers through designing a complex UI as well as advanced concepts such as persistence, state management, and cloud storage with Firebase. In addition, the book covers publishing on both iOS and Android platforms.

The book is normally $60 to purchase and this free offer is valid through January 6 2022.

Apache weekly update 

ApacheCon, the ASF’s global conference series, completed its 2021 events last week and all presentations are available on the ASF YouTube channel. Over the past week, 305 Apache Committers changed 2,145,460 lines of code over 2,767 commits. The top five contributors are Claus Ibsen, Jarek Potiuk, Tilman Hausherr, Tamas Cservenak, and Jacques Le Roux. 

Apache also announced project updates. Apache Storm 1.2.4, 2.1.1, and 2.2.1 were released, Apache Calcite Avatica 1.19.0 was released, Apache CouchDB 3.2.0 was released, and Apache SharingSphere ElasticJob 3.0.1 was released. In terms of business intelligence, Apache Superset CVE-2021-41971 now has a possible SQL Injection when template processing is enabled.

In addition, Apache OpenOffice 4.1.11, Apache Jackrabbit 2.21.8, Oak 1.22.9, Apache Syncope 2.1.10, Apache SIS 1.1, Apache Camel 3.11.3 (LTS), Apache SkyWalking Client JS 0.7.0, Apache Hop (Incubating) 1.0, Apache Tomcat 8.5.72, Apache Traffic Control 6.0.0, Apache Airflow 2.2.0, and Providers (Amazon 2.3.0) were released last week. 

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