GitHub Survey: Open Source is Raining Men!

A 2017 GitHub survey of 5500 randomly selected participants, most of whom work on GitHub.com open source projects, revealed some interesting info.

Not all of it was terribly surprising to me.

For example, the survey responses indicate documentation is important (no surprise there).

Negative interactions are rare, but when they occur they impact the project (again, no surprise).

Open source is the default when choosing software (me too).

But notice this one: “Open source is used by the whole world, but its contributors don’t yet reflect its broad audience”

This ZDnet article has an interesting spin on this particular response to the survey with this article titled: “GitHub: Open source is dominated by men who just can’t communicate”.

The most interesting thing about the survey to me is the difference between the complaints and the willingness on the part of the respondents to address them.

For example, 93% of respondents say incomplete or outdated documentation is a problem, but 60% of contributors say they never write any.

And while almost 3/4 of respondents say they are interested in participating in open source projects, more than half of those say they are unlikely to do so in the future.

You can download the raw data for the survey in a ZIP file, see the goals and design of the survey, and you can even sign up for future survey updates. So be sure to check that out.

It’s Official: Kotlin Supported in Android Studio 3.0

It’s official! Android Studio 3 includes first-class support for Kotlin.

The latest Android Studio 3.0 preview – Canary 1 – was released on May 17th, and includes native, first-class support for Kotlin.

Kotlin is an open source programming language developed by JetBrains in 2010, with the 1.0 release coming out in February of 2016.

The language is completely compatible with the Java language, and compiles down to bytecode that runs on the JVM.

Kotlin can be used for all types of development, from web apps, to server-side code, to, well, Android development.

Release 1.1.2-5 was released this week on June 12th.

If you haven’t looked at Kotlin, you really should. It is super hot and getting more so. The decision to include Kotlin native support in Android Studio 3 says that Kotlin is a serious language.

To learn more about Kotlin, visit the Kotlinlang.org website and click on try Kotlin.

Android O Developer Preview 3 is Available

Android O introduces a number of new features in this release, including

• Per app notification silencing
• Simplified Settings

Check out a full review of Android O at Android Authority.

Under the hood, Android O seems all about optimizing battery life. It’s always a balancing act between letting all the CPU power in today’s state of the art devices run, versus the commensurate battery usage that entails.

Android O has even stricter default background execution limits, to limit what applications that the user isn’t directly using, or are running in the background can do.

There are workarounds for users, though, like temporary whitelisting of certain apps, or for developers, by using the JobScheduler.

Android O contains a migration guide in case you have an app and are wondering, say, why your background app cannot create a background service.

To download the Android O preview 3, check out the downloads page, where you’ll find information about how to download O preview 3, enroll your device in the beta program and get Over-the-Air updates.

Vaadin 8 + Eclipse for Easier Webapp Development

And finally, for today’s code talkthrough, I want to show you just how easy it is to use Vaadin 8 and Eclipse to build web applications.

I’m basing today’s code talkthrough off of a recipe I wrote for IBM developerWorks called Vaadin 8 + Websphere Application Server Liberty Profile.

In this episode, I want to walk you through using the Vaadin 4.0.0 plugin for Eclipse to:

• Create a skeleton application,
• Walk through the code,
• Build and run the application using Maven within Eclipse, and
• Access the application through a browser.

To follow along with the video, you need to have Eclipse installed, the Vaadin 4.0.0.final plugin for Eclipse installed, and an Eclipse plugin for Maven installed (I’m using m2e).

Credits

Music:

Slay Well by Gunnar Olsen, YouTube Audio Library (Free to use for commercial purposes, no attribution required), see YouTube Terms of Service and this YouTube support article for details.

Deep Hat by Vibe Tracks, YouTube Audio Library (Free to use for commercial purposes, no attribution required), see YouTube Terms of Service and this YouTube support article for details.

Pixabay images and videos are free for commercial use, no attribution required. See Pixabay Terms of Service for more information..

Pixabay Video URLs: