InfoWorld

Oracle’s Java team in 2026 will work toward milestones including a preview of value types, an incubation of code reflection, shipping AOT (ahead-of-time) code compilation, and finalizing the structured concurrency API. These efforts and many others under OpenJDK projects such as Project Loom , for exploring JVM (Java Virtual Machine) features and APIs for implementing lightweight user-mode thread…

Since 2008, millions of developers around the world have found answers to their programming questions on the popular platform Stack Overflow. Recently, however, activity has declined significantly, and in December, only 3,862 questions were asked on Stack Overflow, which is a 78 percent decrease on an annual basis. According to Dev Class , the decline is primarily due to the increased use of AI, …

When I started integrating AI into my workflows, I was seduced by the promise of “one tool to rule them all.” One login. One workflow. One platform that would manage research, writing, operations and communications — all in one neat package. In theory, it was elegant. But what I found, in the end, was a trap. What broke first were nonnegotiables: depth, nuance and reliability. The moment I tried …

API platform Postman has acquired API documentation- and SDK-generation startup Fern to extend its support for developers around API adoption. The acquisition targets common pain points, including poor documentation and brittle libraries, that slow adoption of APIs and drive up their integration and support costs. “Postman already helps enterprises design, test, and validate APIs internally. What…

As agentic AI takes hold across the technology industry, development tools are rapidly integrating AI-powered features. Experts say there is a rising demand for AI-assisted low-code and no-code development tools . “The demand is huge,” says Marc-Aurele Legoux, owner of Marcus-Aurelius Digital. “These tools allow anyone with zero to little coding knowledge to develop something that would otherwise…

Every few months, the developer tool hype machine finds a new hero. In 2023, it was GitHub Copilot , the AI pair programmer that made autocomplete feel like magic. In 2024, the vibe shifted to Cursor and the new class of AI-first editors . And now, at least on X, Google’s “agent-first” Antigravity is being pitched as the next inevitable thing. Meanwhile, the model layer keeps whiplashing. First, …

Visual Studio Code 1.108, the latest version of Microsoft’s popular code editor , introduces support for Agent Skills, a new feature that allows users to teach the GitHub Copilot coding agent new capabilities and provide domain-specific knowledge. VS Code 1.108, also known as the December 2025 release, arrived January 8 . Developers can access it for Windows, Linux, and Mac from code.visualstudio…

Snowflake ( NYSE:SNOW ) has rapidly become a staple for data professionals and has arguably changed how cloud developers, data managers and data scientists interact with data. Its architecture is designed to decouple storage and compute, allowing organizations to scale resources independently to optimize costs and performance. For cloud developers, Snowflake’s platform is built to be scalable and…

Snowflake is planning to acquire AI-based site reliability engineer (SRE) platform provider Observe to strengthen observability capabilities across its offerings and help enterprises with AIOps as they accelerate AI pilots into production. “Longer term, Snowflake is positioning itself as infrastructure for AI at scale. As AI agents generate exponentially more data, vertically integrated data and …

2026 is already popping with new Python goodies: an ultra-fast type checker from the makers of uv, Django 6, and a new way to generate C code with Python for faster-executing apps. Read on for these and other highlights. Top picks for Python readers on InfoWorld Reader picks: The most popular Python stories of 2025 What a year 2025 was. From free-threaded Python to integrations with Rust and Zig,…

Microsoft has open-sourced XAML Studio, a rapid protoyping tool for WinUI developers using XAML. Microsoft made the announcement on January 6 . XAML Studio lets developers prototype user interface ideas before integrating them into an app within the Visual Studio IDE . Developers can prototype UWP-based (Universal Windows Platform) XAML apps. Tools and helpers are provided such as live edit and I…

Databricks is joining the AI software vendors quietly admitting that old-fashioned deterministic methods can perform much better than generative AI’s probabilistic approach in many applications. Its new “Instructed Retriever” architecture combines old-fashioned database queries with the similarity search of RAG ( retrieval-augmented generation ) to offer more relevant responses to users’ prompts.…

Devops used to be a simple process. Take one component of the stack, run some unit tests, check a microservice in isolation, confirm it passed integration tests, and ship it. The problem is, that doesn’t test what actually matters—whether the system as a whole can handle production workloads. This simple approach breaks down fast when AI workloads start generating massive volumes of data that nee…

A former longtime contributor to the development of Rust now is building a Rust-based language of his own, called Rue , which is intended to provide memory safety without garbage collection while being easier to use than Rust and Zig . Claude AI technology is being leveraged for developing Rue. Written entirely in Rust, the language is in its early stage of development, with initial support for t…

Microsoft has acquired AI-based data engineering firm Osmos for an undisclosed sum, as part of its effort to reduce data engineering friction inside Fabric, its unified data and analytics offering, as enterprises continue to push analytics and AI projects into production. Osmos’ technology, which applies agentic AI to turn raw data into analytics and AI-ready assets in OneLake, will help customer…