What’s the point: Redis 6.0, IBM Elyra, a cure for Java pains, Facebook Blender, and VS Codespaces

What’s the point: Redis 6.0, IBM Elyra, a cure for Java pains, Facebook Blender, and VS Codespaces

Work on version 6.0 of in-memory data structure store Redis is done. The new release is now available for downloading via the project site and comes with client-side caching, SSL support, access control lists, diskless replication on replicas, and threaded I/O amongst other things.

Since the first release candidate was announced last December, the Redis community went some lengths to get those features stable, but also added improvements such as the STRALGO command, which implements complex string algorithms, or a mode “where RDB files used for replication are immediately deleted if no longer useful”.

IBM builds on Jupyter to simplify AI development

With Jupyter notebooks becoming more and more of a data science staple, IBM decided to join the party by throwing its Elyra AI Toolkit into the open. The project is designed to provide “AI-centric extensions to Jupyter Notebooks” and a new user interface to simplify the AI development process.

In its first iteration, Elyra comes with a visual editor for pipelines, hybrid runtime support, and the ability to run notebooks as batch jobs amongst other things. A integration with version control system git is also part of the package, so that there are ways to keep track of what has changed and where something might have gone awry.

Facebook shares chatbot innards for others to build upon

After some years of research, Facebook’s AI division has released the code to it’s open-domain chatbot Blender. The system is advertised as the first to blend empathy, knowledge, and personality, using a model with a rather hefty 9.4 billion parameters. Source code, model, and evaluation set-up are available on GitHub.

Oracle starts Leyden to ease Java pains

Last week, Oracle’s Marc Reinhold called the OpenJDK mailing list to discuss a new project which he hopes will “address the long-term pain points of Java’s slow startup time, slow time to peak performance, and large footprint”. 

Leyden, as it is dubbed for now, is supposed to introduce the concept of static images, standalone programs derived from applications that run an application, into the Java platform and the JDK, taking inspiration from GraalVM, amongst other projects.

It will “start with a clone of the current JDK main-line release, JDK 15, and track main-line releases going forward.” Reinhold expects “deliver Leyden over time, in a series of JEPs that will likely span multiple feature releases.”

Microsoft turns Visual Studio Online into VS Codespaces

Microsoft decided to rework its online IDE Visual Studio Online, lowering the price, and rebranding it as Visual Studio Codespaces. The new name is meant to reflect the sentiment that it’s more than just an in-browser editor and will make its way into docs and product description in the coming weeks.

To make it more accessible, the company decided to drop the pricing from $0.45 for a standard four core, 8GB RAM Linux instance per hour, to $0.17, while premium pricing comes in at $0.34 instead of $0.87 per hour on an eight core, 16 GB RAM instance. The offer will also see the addition of a new basic instance which contains two virtual cores at a lower price point ($0.08 per hour), to make it more of an option for devs wanting to run multiple smaller Codespaces.