Languages and standards - News, Features, and Slideshows

Features

  • Sick of Flash security holes? HTML5 has its own

    HTML5 has been billed as the natural, standards-based successor to proprietary plug-ins such as Adobe's Flash Player for providing rich multimedia services on the Web. But when it comes to security, one of Flash's major weaknesses, HTML5 is no panacea.

  • Java at 20: The programming juggernaut rolls on

    What began as an experiment in consumer electronics in the early 1990s celebrates its 20th anniversary as a staple of enterprise computing this week. Java has become a dominant platform, able to run wherever the Java Virtual Machine is supported, forging ahead despite the rise of rival languages and recent tribulations with security.

  • Put your API on a JSON diet

    Last week I discussed design considerations for APIs, given that APIs aren't applications and shouldn't be treated as such. At small scales, APIs that come along for the ride with bulky Web frameworks might be fine, but beyond that you're asking for trouble. If you're building an API that will serve a large number of clients, your API code should be thin and tight, as well as make liberal use of caching. Otherwise, the future headaches will be crippling.

  • Node.js goes pro: New opportunities -- and risks

    In its mere five years of existence, Node.js has transformed from a technological curiosity to a technology stack all its own, providing a major building block for everything from microservices to APIs.

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