Developer Break: Go, PHP, jQuery, CouchDB, TIOBE and OASIS

Developer Break – catch up on the smaller but important notes for developers, from libraries to APIs and from people to postings. In this edition: Go, PHP, jQuery, CouchDB, Metasploit, PhoneGap, TIOBE, OASIS, App Engine, Amazon Web Services and Intel's latest SDK.

Open source languages

• Google's Go 1.1 has reached beta 2 and, while not ready to be a release candidate, it is ready for testing – only critical bugs will now be fixed before release. One new feature is the integrated Data Race Detector for spotting race conditions in the concurrent language. Check out the release notes for changes before downloading.

• PHP 5.1.4 and 5.3.24 have been released. The updates fix around ten bugs and upgrade the PCRE library to PCRE 8.32.

Open source libraries and tools

• jQuery 2.0 is on its way and the latest beta 3 release even comes with a ransom note to encourage developers to test the latest beta. jQuery 2.0 will be saying goodbye to IE 6, 7 and 8 support so now could be a good time to test it.

• The Apache CouchDB developers have released a feature update to the JSON document database. The release notes for CouchDB 1.3.0 say it now has the manual built into Futon, handles recursion and URL rewriting better, has a new UUID scheme in the replicator and has experimental support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.

• Metasploit, the penetration testing tool, has been updated to version 4.6.0, adding in support for testing for flaws in the OWASP 2013 Top 10, along with six new modules, improved spidering, SQL injection shells, and a phishing simulation wizard.

• PhoneGap 2.6.0 has been released with a focus on fixing bugs in all versions of the mobile device platform.

Trends and events

• There's little movement on the latest TIOBE Programming Language Index apart, that is, from Objective-C not only halting its steady rise in the chart, but actually dropping a place in the monthly index, from third to fourth, in its first slip since 2009.

• The information standards organisation OASIS has been accredited by ANSI, becoming one of the first non-US-centric organisations to be able to present its standards to the American National Standards Institute.

Services and SDKs

• Intel's Perceptual Computing SDK 2013 is now production ready for developers to create applications with hand and finger tracking, speech recognition, face analysis and augmented realities.

• Google has updated App Engine to 1.7.7. The update makes Java 7 support generally available, enhances the service's Maven plugin, removes minimum billing rates, and has a preview of Google Cloud SDK.

• Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk for .NET now has support for Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud and works with Amazon's RDS database service.

(djwm)