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Monday, March 4, 2019

Using Composer With WordPress

Report: Open source breaches have increased by 71 percent

A report from Sonatype highlights that open source breaches have increased by a whopping 71 percent along with several other security findings.

This report is the largest DevOps survey conducted by Sonatype with 5,558 people sharing their views. Participants were from most of the major sectors but primarily in the technology and banking/financial industries.

Respondents’ primary reason for implementing security across the development lifecycle is for risk management (34.77%) purposes, followed by improving the quality of code (24.75%). Compliance requirements (23.42%) was just behind.

48 percent of developers this year report that security is important but they don’t have enough time to spend on it. This is the same as the previous year, although down from 50 percent in 2017 which indicates developers are still feeling time-constrained.

The report quotes Lu Cortez from graphic design website Canva:

“Not recognising the importance of security in a DevOps strategy is a recipe for disaster. No matter how fast the velocity of a DevOps organization, if what they produce is not supportive of confidentiality, integrity, and availability then they have failed. Including security in everything that is done is part of enabling the business to meet its strategic goals. DevOps needs security.”

Over 85 percent of modern applications use open source components; in part due to the aforementioned time constraints. Developers are opting to use pre-existing code rather than write their own.

A concerning 47 percent of DevOps organisations do not maintain a complete record of what components are used in their applications. Of those with an ‘elite’ DevOps practice – 38 percent report third-party components as being ‘locked down’, 36 percent have ‘some standards’, and 26 percent have ‘no standards’.

In 2014, 14 percent suspected or verified a security breach related to an open source component. This year, that grew to one in four.

There’s an interesting discrepancy between large (more than 5000 developers) and small (less than 100) development teams when it comes to security policies. For small teams, over 60 percent don’t believe their security policies are slowing development. With large teams, almost 53 percent believe they are.

Fortunately, the majority have a cybersecurity incident response plan in place. 81 percent for those with elite DevOps practices. This drops to 63 percent for those without a DevOps practice in place.

You can download a copy of the full report here.

(Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash)

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam to learn more.

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Friday, March 1, 2019

Python overtakes JavaScript as most queried language on Stack Overflow, new data shows

A new study from crowdsourced QA testers Global App Testing has explored developers’ biggest pain points, with Python dethroning JavaScript as Stack Overflow’s most questioned programming language.

The research focused on JavaScript, Python, R, Ruby, C#, C++, Java, Objective-C, Swift, PHP and SQL – not so much 11 languages but 10 languages and a database – and went through a semantic route to determine major issues.

In terms of sheer numbers, JavaScript came out on top with more than 1.75 million questions asked over Stack Overflow’s more than 10-year history. Java came second with 1.51m, with C# (1.28m), PHP (1.26m) and Python (1.1m) the others to break the million mark. Yet with regard to today, Python is top of the shop, having overtaken JavaScript for questions asked in late 2018.

Digging down into what developers were looking for in each language – the data cleaning was done in Python and the word cloud builder was in JavaScript, just to be fair – led to arguably few surprises. For JavaScript, ‘jQuery’ was by far the most questioned framework, with ‘function’, ‘duplicate’ and ‘string’ also popular words. For Python, the latter two were the most popular, but of interest to note was ‘django’. “Python is a general purpose duct-tape language and gets involved in many different domains of tech,” as the researchers put it.

The other languages analysed came up with some more interesting results. For Ruby, the most popular word was ‘rails’; hardly surprising, but it was the most popular by a street. More niche-purpose languages such as R, for data scientists, came back with more specific terms, including ‘dataframe’, ‘datatable’ and ‘ggplot’.

Global App Testing assessed the overall research thus. “Each programming language has over time been geared toward – or was even designed for – a particular niche within tech,” the company noted. “R is to data science as Swift is to iOS development as C++ is to video game development. This explains some of the differences in the types of problems that arise… why we see ‘database’ a commonly questioned concept in SQL but not, for example, Objective-C.

“Despite these obvious differences, these visualisations represent some fundamental similarities within the different domains,” the company added. “Base-level data types such as strings and arrays – but not integers, floats, or Boolean values, apparently – are frequently pain points that cause developers of all stripes and creeds to turn to Stack Overflow.”

The developer portal has previously noted some of these trends. A report from Stack Overflow last January noted how jQuery remained the most popular JavaScript framework while adding the share for market voice was ‘brutal’, while as far back as September 2017 the company was assessing what it called ‘incredible’ growth in Python.

You can read the full Global App Testing analysis here.

Main picture credit: Global App Testing. Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this? Attend the co-located IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

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Organizing Brainstorming Workshops: A Designer’s Guide

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Apple will enable developers to lure ex-subscribers back with discounts

Apple has announced it will soon allow developers to lure users who previously had an in-app subscription back with discounts.

In an App Store Connect post, Apple wrote:

“Apps with auto-renewable subscriptions will soon be able to provide a discounted price for a specific duration for existing or previously subscribed customers. You can use subscription offers to help win back subscribers who have cancelled their subscriptions or promote an upgrade to another subscription at a special price. Customers can accept the offer even if they’ve already completed an introductory offer.”

The feature will be enabled for iOS, macOS, and tvOS apps.

Apple will provide three different options:

Free

Customers access your subscription for free for a specific duration — for example, a 30-day trial for a subscription with a standard renewal price of $4.99 per month.

Pay As You Go

Customers pay a promotional price for each billing period for a selected duration — for example, $1.99 per month for three months for a subscription with a standard renewal price of $9.99 per month.

Pay Up Front

Customers pay a one-time promotional price for a specific duration — for example, $9.99 for the first six months of a subscription with a standard renewal price of $39.99 per year.

Apple says existing subscribers can also be targeted in order to help boost retention and reduce any feelings their loyalty is being penalised.

Once the desired offers are created in App Store Connect, developers must download the Xcode 10.2 beta and implement the new StoreKit APIs to allow these offers to be accepted by the customer.

(Photo by James Wheeler on Unsplash)

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