Jaspersoft, a new acquisition of TIBCO Software, is an open source software vendor that concentrates in providing products used for Business Intelligence (BI).

TIBCO Software recently released Jaspersoft’s newest product – Jaspersoft 5.6. It includes a new Javascript framework that offers built-in analytics and reports called Visualize.js.

The Jaspersoft group came up with Visualize.js because they envision that analytics “is becoming a core component and differentiator of applications and services” for application developers. There is now an increase growth in embedding analytic functionality, however, it is “too complex or too costly” to implement. Jaspersoft’s solution was to incorporate REST and iFrame approaches in this product. “REST gives you a lot of control, but it’s very code-intensive to embed. iFrame is simple, but essentially a dumb terminal window. We give you the best of both worlds. You get the control of REST with the simplicity of iFrames. With just a couple of lines of JavaScript, you can embed pretty much any part of our server.” Karl van den Vergh, Jaspersoft’s Senior Vice President said.

Visualize.js equips your applications with the following features:

• Embed Analytics Anywhere – it has the ability of an analytic server with the control of JavaScript and is available as a cloud service.
• Combine Big Data with Relational Data – Data from MongoDB, Hadoop or Cassandra can be combined with relational data using Visualize.js.
• Powerful Analytic Functions – provides new built-in analytic calculations and functions.
• New Data Visualizations – includes five new visualizations such as bubble, spider and dual level pie charts.
• Boosted Report Interactivity – improved interactive report viewing and navigation on multi-page reports.

It also includes other features such as:

• Faster Platform Performance
• Offline Mode for Mobile Devices
• New Metadata Administration
• Enhanced OLAP Engine

Triumph Learning is one of the companies who used Visualize.js in their application. They built a web-based application called GET Waggle using a beta version of Visualize.js, the application simplifies tracking and measuring students’ progress and growth. With interactive visualizations, teachers and school administrators are delighted in using their application.

Objective-C is the primary programming language used to develop Mac OS X and iOS applications for the past decades. However, earlier this June, Apple released its new programming language called Swift.

Apple described that writing code with Swift is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast; Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C thus ready to use for your next iOS and OS X project – or for addition into your current app.

The following are some of Swift language’s best features:

Modern Programming Language

• Swift is the result of research on programming languages that takes the best features of C and Object-C, removing the restrictions on C compatibility.
• APIs are easy to read and maintain.
• Cleaner codes.
• Managed memory automatically using Automatic Reference Counting (ARC).
• Typing semi-colons is no longer needed.

User-Friendly

• Ideal for new programmers as it uses Playgrounds that show results immediately after typing a line of code which makes writing simple and fun.
• Adopts the readability of Objective-C’s named parameters and the power of Objective-C’s dynamic object model.
• Offer easy access to existing Cocoa frameworks.

Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL)

• A built-in interactive version of Swift language is included in Xcode’s debugging console or in Terminal. To evaluate and interact with a running app or see how a newly written code works in a script-like environment, use Swift syntax.

Safe

• Removes all classes of unsafe code.
• Always initialized variables before use.
• Checks arrays and integers for overflow.
• Safe patterns in Swift are adjusted for the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch APIs.

Fast and Powerful

• Uses high-performance LLVM compiler that transforms Swift code into optimized native code.
• Improved syntax and standard library.
• Includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators.
• Offer object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics suitable for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.

Developers can now start using Swift code to add new features or improve existing applications. They can also submit Swift-written apps to App Store and Mac App Store once iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are released.

In May 2014, ZeroTurnaround, a software company who created JRebel & LiveRebel, released the result of their global survey on 2164 Java professionals for their 5th year in Java development research reports.

The following are the results for The 2014 Leaderboard of Java Tools and Technologies survey, which has a 2.1% sample error:

82.5% – JUnit : Top testing framework used by developers
70% – Jenkins : Most used CI Server in the industry
69% – Git : #1 Version Control technology out there
67% – Hibernate : the top ORM Framework used
65% – Java 7 : the industry leader for SE Development
64% – Maven : Most used build tool in Java
64% – Nexus : the main repository used by developers
56% – MongoDB : The NoSQL technology of choice
55% – FindBugs : most-used Static Code Analysis Tool
50% – Tomcat : the most popular Application Server
49% – Java EE 6 : found in the most enterprises
48% – Eclipse : the IDE used more than any other
40% – Spring MVC : most commonly used Web Framework
32% – MySQL : the most popular SQL technology

The top four technologies in which developers are really interested in are as follows:

58% – Gradle : almost 6 in 10 developers say they want to learn more about build tool.
49% – IntelliJ IDEA : almost half of developers would rather use IntelliJ than any other IDE
47% – Scala : 47% choose Scala as their next JVM language
35% – Java 8 : over 1/3 of developers see getting familiar with Java 8 as their highest priority until 2015<

Seventy one percent of the Software Developers (which Java professionals commonly called as) build Web Apps while only 3% voted for creating apps for Mobile. Most of them still use Microsoft Windows (50%) for desktops and Google Android (66%) for mobiles.

For Java EE, 68% use the Java EE (+SE) in which Java EE version 6 made it to the top with 49% votes. Meanwhile, Java 7 got 65% for the most commonly used version of Java SE.

Using only SQL got 53% votes wherein MySQL (32%), Oracle DB (30%) and PostgreSQL (19%) made it to the top 3 for the Primary SQL technology while MongoDB dominates the Primary NoSQL technology category with 56% votes.