Slint, a Rust-based GUI toolkit, supports developing apps on Android with its Thursday release of Slint version 1.5.
The GUI toolkit allows JavaScript, C++ or Rust developers to create native user interfaces for embedded and desktop applications. For embedded developers, who prefer using an Android BSP instead of an embedded Linux distribution, the Slint on Android port allows the development and deployment of Slint applications on embedded Android.
It also now features an improved live preview for quicker iterations.
Finally, the company is developing an API so that Python developers can use Slint. It’s currently in the alpha stage, but Slint is seeking users to experiment with it and provide feedback on it.
Astro Adds Managed Database
The web framework Astro released Astro Database Tuesday. It’s a SQL database that Astro boasts is a fully managed database for Astro “that is fast, lightweight, and ridiculously easy to use.”
Astro is focused on building content-driven websites, team Platform Manager Matthew Phillips explained. Its inspiration has been WordPress, which offers a built-in database — something the Astro team knew they also wanted to add.
“You’re not just managing your article content, you’re managing data, pages, blocks, images, and an entire ecosystem of plugins,” he said.
However, there were obstacles to their plan, he said.
“We prototyped the idea but ran into a few blockers. SQLite is a C library, so it needs native add-ons to run in Node.js,” he wrote. “This is ok for local development, but native add-ons are difficult to deploy to serverless hosts and the startup time was worrisome. Additionally, key environments like StackBlitz would fail to run it entirely.”
Enter libSQL, a solution created by Turso that is a fork of SQLite. It “introduces a collection of improvements to the runtime while maintaining compatibility with classic SQLite,” Phillips wrote. “libSQL features a modern database client for JavaScript/TypeScript that avoids the native bindings and compilation steps that plague the rest of the ecosystem. It could even run on StackBlitz via WASM.”
Astro has partnered with Turbo to host the libSQL databases.
“Their commitment to a ‘database per tenant’ model was a perfect fit for our need to spin up hundreds of thousands of databases, all on demand,” he added.
Astro DB provides a fully local libSQL database as soon as the dev server starts up. It will automatically:
- Create an empty database at .astro/data.db
- Read your schema from db/config.ts
- Seed the database from db/seed.ts
Storybook 8 Adds Support for React Server Components
Storybook 8 was released last Friday with support for React Server Components (RSC). Support for RSC is one of the most popular GitHub requests the company has received, noted product lead Michael Shilman.
“Storybook 8 heads your call and introduces our first-ever experimental support for React Server Components,” Shilman wrote. “We’re classifying our RSC solution as experimental because it’s compatible only with Next.js – for now. We’ll continue building this functionality through future releases.”
This update also includes major improvements to the UI tool’s testing and documentation feature sets “while strengthening framework compatibility and user experience across React, Vue, Angular, web components, Svelte and more.”
Storybook is a frontend workshop for building UI components and pages in isolation. It integrates with all major JavaScript frameworks.
Another major improvement in this release is a new Visual Tests add-on that helps developers more readily identify UI bugs.
“The addon brings Chromatic, the visual testing cloud service developed by Storybook maintainers, into Storybook for the very first time,” noted Shilman.
This release also includes major improvements to control autogeneration for React and Vue projects and redesigned Vite support, including support for Vite 5, he added.
“Today, Vite accounts for nearly half of all new Storybook projects. Accordingly, we’ve continued to tighten and refine our Vite integration,” Shilman said.
Finally, Storybook has overhauled its mobile UI completely so that the navigation sidebar and add-on panel “spring up” from the bottom of the page, which makes them easy to trigger on a phone.
New AI Developer Alliance Forms
The AI Developer Alliance, led by AI development firm Clarifai, launched Thursday. Its goal is to bring together developers and organizations for collaboration and to share best practices, ethics and knowledge about AI.
Clarifia is a full-stack AI, large language model and computer vision production platform for modeling unstructured image, video, text, and audio data.
So far, the Alliance includes Postman, Coder, DBT Labs, LlamaIndex, DSPy, Deepgram, Weaviate, LangChain, New York University, Cleanlab, Tabnine, Sieve Data, Brev.dev, Cast AI, Ikigai, Last9, and YCurb. Clarifai will serve as an administrative facilitator of the alliance.
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Loraine Lawson is a veteran technology reporter who has covered technology issues from data integration to security for 25 years. Before joining The New Stack, she served as the editor of the banking technology site Bank Automation News. She has…
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