The motto for the Tibbo Project System (TBS) is “Take what you need. Leave out what you don't.” TPS, winner of a red dot Design Award, is Tibbo Technology's highly configurable and affordable automation platform featuring miniature blocks that implement specific I/O features. Need a certain I/O function? Install the respective Tibbit. No use for something? Skip it. Tibbo Technology argues that this module-based approach saves users money by allowing precise definition of the features in automation controllers. Tibbo's latest complement to TBS is a Linux-based Tibbo Project PCB (LTPP). The new LTPP3 board runs Tibbo's own, highly polished and updated distribution of Linux and is based on the powerful Texas Instruments 1GHz Cortex-A8 Sitara CPU. What sets the LTPP3 apart from plain vanilla products, such as Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone, is its mechanical and electrical compatibility with Tibbo's Tibbit blocks and size-3 Tibbo Project Box enclosures. Uses for the LTPP3 include running Embedded AggreGate, Node.js and TiOS applications, not to mention use as a generic Linux board.
Open source and DevOps have been a boon to software development. Nevertheless, sneaky hackers understand—and exploit—the fact that reusable code also means reusable vulnerabilities to distribute throughout the global software supply chain. To aid developers in navigating this new threat landscape, SourceClear announced a new product, SourceClear Open, a cloud service that tracks thousands of threat sources and analyzes millions of open-source library releases. In explaining the need for SourceClear Open, the company notes that developers are held increasingly accountable for security, which creates demand for tools that help them with this responsibility. Unfortunately, traditional security products are insufficient, and public and government-backed software vulnerability databases have limitations. The SourceClear Open tool vaults beyond these databases, enabling developers to identify what open-source libraries they are using, what vulnerabilities exist, which vulnerabilities actually matter, and what needs to be done to fix them. And, perhaps most important, SourceClear Open integrates with the tools (GitHub and Jenkins) and supports the languages (Java, Ruby, Python and JavaScript) upon which development teams rely.
“Everyone Can Code” is the vision that its maker has for LiveCode, a highly productive coding environment for Linux, Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and Server platforms. LiveCode Ltd. spent three years and weathered a $750,000 Kickstarter to enable a LiveCode rewrite from the ground up. The result is LiveCode 8, which adds a new plug-in architecture that allows users to drag/drop widgets containing sophisticated functionality. Widgets can be built within the LiveCode platform and used to wrap functionality in external libraries or each of the operating systems LiveCode supports. The new features in LiveCode 8 are intended to empower a new audience of app makers. Some of these include nine pre-made widgets, 46 new extensions, the all new LiveCode Builder language, a 3.5x performance boost, Script Only stacks for better version control and working in teams, LiveCode for HTML5 and a new Feature Exchange for community funding of new features, among others.
The CTO at Rogue Wave Software, Zeev Suraski, says he's never seen anything like PHP 7 in the software space—namely the halving of hardware needs after a mostly painless software upgrade. Organizations salivating to leverage this massive performance gain would be wise to investigate Zend Server 9, an application server that builds on the benefits of PHP 7, both on-premises and in the cloud. This new version of Zend Server also offers code tracing and black box recording, making it an effortless process to perform root-cause analysis. Another key feature is Z-Ray, a developer toolkit that accelerates developer productivity by displaying all of the under-the-hood details of a page request across all the PHP scripts involved in building a page. Finally, with Zend Server 9, Rogue Wave introduces Zend Server Professional Plus and Zend Server Enterprise Plus editions that offer customers expert support for the open-source stack underlying the Zend Server-hosted PHP application.
Expert Android Studio is a new book for expert and experienced developers who want to take their Android programming skills to the next level by unleashing the potential of Android Studio. Authors Murat Yener and Onur Dundar, developers at Intel and self-described open-source code geeks, have packed their new Wrox-published book with best practices and advanced tips and techniques on Android tools, the development cycle, continuous integration, release management, testing and performance. After reading the book, developers will push the boundaries of the Android platform with the developer tools. Besides discovering the basics of working in Android Studio and Gradle, readers will explore the application architecture of the latest Android platform; understand the Native Development Kit; complete the development lifecycle with automated tests, dependency management, continuous integration and release management; write their own Gradle plugins to customize the build cycle and write plugins to support development tasks.
SUSE Manager is a open-source IT management solution with a centralized console for managing multiple Linux distributions, hardware platforms (x86, IBM Power Systems and z Systems), as well as physical, virtual and cloud environments. SUSE says that the solution helps customers reduce the complexities of managing their IT infrastructures, a key advantage as customers look to cut costs and increase the responsiveness required to adopt DevOps and hybrid cloud solutions. The updated SUSE Manager 3 is now available, featuring Salt automation software, improved configuration management, easier subscription management and enhanced monitoring capabilities. Confronting the fact that manually updating, patching and configuring servers can be difficult and time-consuming, SUSE Manager reduces costs with automated, centralized management of Linux systems.
Got VC cash to burn on your startup's cool factor? Clarus Glassboards LLC has just the image-maker you need in Balance, the “World's First Luxury Ping Pong Table”. A limited edition item—just 25 will be made—Balance will get your team's creative juices back in the game. Balance is a horizontal version of Clarus Glassboards' primary product, esthetically pleasing dry-erase glass systems of various forms that allow teams to brainstorm and share ideas or add “chic” accents to their offices. With Balance, work and play are creatively fused like never before. The table is set atop a refined wood base, and the mesh net is removable, allowing it to be used for conferences and dining.
Firebird distills its identity into the phrase “True universal open-source database” and boasts not only of being “free like free beer” but also, fittingly, of being “free like a bird”. The latter permits anyone to build a custom version of the Firebird, as long as the modifications are made available for others to use and build upon. Technically speaking, Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features and runs on Linux, Windows and various UNIX platforms. Firebird 3.0 is the latest major release that succeeds most notably in unifying the server architecture and improving support for SMP and multiple-core hardware platforms. Parallel gains in 3.0 include an improvement in the threading of engine processes and the options for sharing page cache across thread and connection boundaries, among other improvements.
