Popular programming languages or the Good, the Bad, and the Most Wanted of Coding tools. Software engineers feel strongly when choosing between one technology or another. And it sure pays to listen to them carefully. We certainly do, at Tremend. The yearly survey from Stack Overflow is one of the most relevant sources of industry insights. Here are some interesting findings for 2017.

Most popular programming languages

No major changes here – JavaScript is for the fifth year in a row the most commonly used language. There is one interesting change among the top five languages – the use of Python overtook PHP for the first time in five years.

Most loved programming languages

What is love, in this case? Love is when developers want to continue to work with a language, more than any other. And for the second year in a row, Rust came at the top of the list.

Most dreaded languages

Where there is love, there is the opposite as well (no room for hate here, though). For the second year in a row, Visual Basic ranked as the most dreaded language. Meaning that developers are not keen to continue using the particular technology.

Most dreaded programming languages in 2017 – Stack Overflow

Most wanted languages

As for the most wanted languages, Python shot from fourth place last year to the top of the list in 2017 (meaning that developers want to use this year more than any other).

Most wanted programming languages in 2017 – Stack Overflow

The database category

For the first time, Stack Overflow has asked developers about their feelings about databases. MySQL is the winner here.

Popular databases — Most popular databases in 2017 – Stack Overflow

Redis was the most loved database, meaning that proportionally, more developers wanted to continue working with it than any other database.

Meanwhile, Oracle is the most dreaded, while the most wanted database is MongoDB this year.

The framework category

In the world of programming frameworks, Node.js is a star, as both the most commonly used and the most wanted framework.

At the two extremes of the feelings roller coaster, React is the most loved among developers, while Cordova is the most dreaded.

There are a lot more than popular programming languages in the Stack Overflow survey. Read it for interesting developer insights about platforms, development environments, or top-paying technologies.

Needless to say, we are rather delighted to find the world’s most used, loved, and wanted technologies among the set of languages we deploy at Tremend. Download this presentation for a full list of technologies and frameworks that we are experts in.

Tremend delivers full solutions ranging from mobile applications, online stores, or complex banking software to embedded software for the automotive sector. For over 11 years we have developed Internet of Things solutions, e-commerce platforms, enterprise solutions, embedded software, CRM, CMS, ERP integration, and custom software. Over two million users benefit from solutions developed by our team of software engineers.

Contact us for support in developing your own software projects.

Congrats to the RightsFlow team for the recent acquisition by Google. We are glad that we were able to bring our contribution to this success. Tremend provided software services for implementation of Limelight (songclearance.com), Rightsflow’s main licensing tool.

Limelight allows music licensing for the song you want to cover either in digital, physical, streaming, or ringtone format. You can enter the song information, pay the royalty fees and you will receive a PDF license after Rightsflow’s licensing department verifies the copyright owner and pays the royalties on your behalf. The solution integrates with PayPal Pro for payment processing. You can also bulk upload songs for a faster experience.

Good luck to the RightsFlow team, now part of YouTube!

Nowadays UTF8 is far from being just “trendy”, it’s the de facto standard for information representation. There are a lot of discussions on the “why locales are bad” theme, and I’m not going to argue with that.

Getting right to the point, how can you use UTF8 in your PHP/MySql web app? First things first: use PHP 5 and MySql 4.1 as minimum requirements. The reason is the same for both of these apps: native/decent UTF8 support.

For MySql, define your tables with UTF8 character set and collation:

CREATE TABLE table_name (

....................

) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

For PHP, set the UTF8 encoding before extracting your information from MySql

if (!$link = mysql_connect(‘mysql_host’, ‘mysql_user’, ‘mysql_password’)) {

echo ‘Could not connect to mysql’;
exit;
}

if (!mysql_select_db(‘mysql_dbname’, $link)) {

echo ‘Could not select database’;
exit;
}
$sql = “SET NAMES ‘utf8′”;
mysql_query($sql, $link);

//select your UTF8 data
$sql = “SELECT foo FROM table_name”;
$result = mysql_query($sql, $link);if (!$result) {

echo “DB Error, could not query the database\n”;
echo ‘MySQL Error: ‘ . mysql_error();
exit;
}?>

If you need to process your UTF8 strings use the multi-byte versions of the string functions (they have the same name but an “mb_” prepended, e.g. mb_substr) as they work at the character level rather than the byte level.

For omitting the string encoding parameter that can be passed to the multi-byte string functions is useful to set the default encoding to UTF8 by issuing:

mb_internal_encoding(“UTF-8”);