SmartBear announced a new version of its API design and documentation tool, SwaggerHub, integrating Stoplight’s API open source tools.
It's become common practice to use open source languages to code, helping companies iterate and release more quickly in a DevOps world. However, these languages bring some challenges with them, adding complexity and risk. Developers are still wasting time on retrofitting languages to comply with enterprise criteria, according to ActiveState's annual developer survey.
The amount of time spent on programming has dropped almost 20% since last year. More than 61% of respondents spend just four hours or less per day programming — that is, actually doing their job. Developers aren't able to focus efforts on high-value work due to non-coding activities like retrofitting software for security and open source licenses after application software and languages have been built.
Another important finding is that 41% of enterprise IT departments experienced some or many problems ensuring that security is up to date with the latest or most secure version of every package. In addition, 40% experienced some or many problems building new, stable releases that behave the same as old releases.
These statistics speak to the fact that IT departments lack visibility into new security threats and struggle to track code in production for required updates, patches and new vulnerabilities. Development grabs from open source ecosystems, which consist of thousands of third-party packages that may or may not comply with enterprise security and open source license criteria. This, of course, can expose a company to application-level security vulnerabilities.
As for open source languages themselves, popularity and satisfaction aren't always connected. For daily use, developers most often use SQL (80%) — but Python has the highest satisfaction levels: 77% were satisfied or very satisfied with it.
Perhaps its satisfaction is owed to the fact that Python is quite flexible. It began as a scripting solution for sysadmins, then became useful to web development for programmers and is now the driving force behind machine learning. The language's usage continues to grow — developers clearly want to use it. So, to support this usage, organizations need to ensure their developers can do so safely and securely.
And for organizations to effectively decrease the risks and costs of managing open source languages they should implement a systematic and automated workflow: Open Source Language Automation. This workflow can be broken down into four steps:
1. Define Policies
Companies must set organization-wide open source language policies, version controls and triggers.
2. Centralize Dependencies
Track languages and packages across DevOps cycles to assess open source usage and ultimately produce a single source of truth for open source languages.
3. Automate Your Builds
Reduce vulnerabilities and increase application quality by automatically creating builds with a systematic, repeatable build process organization-wide.
4. Deploy and Manage Artifacts
Automatically update all test, stage and production servers with the appropriate and latest open source language builds.
Open source languages provide the flexibility developers are looking for, so they are here to stay in the enterprise. Using the four steps will help your organization continue to iterate quickly, but with greater efficiency and security.
Methodology: ActiveState surveyed 1,250 developers in 88 countries on what they're spending their work hours on and how they are using open source languages. Respondent ages ranged from under 25 to 61+ years, with those in their early 40s making up the largest group at almost 15%. The largest number of responses came from the U.S., Canada and Germany.
Industry News
Red Hat announced updates to Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain.
Tricentis announced the latest update to the company’s AI offerings with the launch of Tricentis Copilot, a suite of solutions leveraging generative AI to enhance productivity throughout the entire testing lifecycle.
CIQ launched fully supported, upstream stable kernels for Rocky Linux via the CIQ Enterprise Linux Platform, providing enhanced performance, hardware compatibility and security.
Redgate launched an enterprise version of its database monitoring tool, providing a range of new features to address the challenges of scale and complexity faced by larger organizations.
Snyk announced the expansion of its current partnership with Google Cloud to advance secure code generated by Google Cloud’s generative-AI-powered collaborator service, Gemini Code Assist.
Kong announced the commercial availability of Kong Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Pegasystems announced the general availability of Pega Infinity ’24.1™.
Sylabs announces the launch of a new certification focusing on the Singularity container platform.
OpenText™ announced Cloud Editions (CE) 24.2, including OpenText DevOps Cloud and OpenText™ DevOps Aviator.
Postman announced its acquisition of Orbit, the community growth platform for developer companies.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced new email security features that enhance its Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration portfolio: Patented unified quarantine, DMARC monitoring, archiving, and Smart Banners.
Automation Anywhere announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to leverage the combined power of generative AI and its own specialized, generative AI automation models to give companies a powerful solution to optimize and transform their business.
Jetic announced the release of Jetlets, a low-code and no-code block template, that allows users to easily build any technically advanced integration use case, typically not covered by alternative integration platforms.
Progress announced new powerful capabilities and enhancements in the latest release of Progress® Sitefinity®.