By Paul Krill | InfoWorld

Google and JetBrains are offering on Monday technology upgrades in the HTML5 and PHP application development spaces respectively with Google upgrading GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and JetBrains adding to its PHP IDE.

With GWT 2.2, for building browser applications, Google is including support for HTML5-specific features, such as the canvas 2D element and the embedding of audio and video tags. “These APIs are still experimental and may change a bit over the next couple releases, but we feel that they’re stable enough to deserve some real mileage [by you],” said Chris Ramsdale, of Google Developer Tools Team, in a blog post.

[ HTML5 will be finished in 2014, the World Wide Web Consortium said on Monday. | Get your websites up to speed with HTML5 today using the techniques in InfoWorld's HTML5 Deep Dive PDF how-to report. ]

But GWT version 2.2 (Zip file) will have only deprecated support for Java 1.5, resulting in warnings when building applications. “While Java 1.5 will still work for this release of GWT, developers should upgrade their version of Java to correct these warnings and ensure compatibility with future versions of GWT,” said Ramsdale.

Google also is offering Google Plugin for Eclipse 2.2, which integrates the GWT Designer AJAX user interface designer. Google Plugin for Eclipse makes it easy to deploy and run applications on the Google App Engine cloud platform, Google claimed.

Version 1.4.2 of the App Engine SDK, released late last week, features an improved XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) API to help applications better interact with users, Google said. With XMPP, notifications are sent when users sign in and out. The application can set presence details for a user. Task Queue performance and Task Queue API improvements in version 1.4.2, meanwhile, include increasing the rate at which tasks can be processed to 100 tasks per second.

An API added in the new version of App Engine allows for programmatically deleting tasks instead of managing this manually from the admin console.

JetBrains is releasing its PHPStorm 2.0 PHP IDE. It features support for PHP 5.3 namespaces and closures, ECMAscript 5, and Less and SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) extensions for cascading style seets. Less features a dynamic stylesheet language while SASS extends CSS with nested rules, variables, and other features.

Version 2.0 also has a streamlined UI. Debugging has been improved with a zero-configuration debugger, JetBrains said. More code inspection is featured, as well as automatic code completion and GitHub repository and Mercurial source code management integrations. Editors are included for SQL queries.

I’m not sure if there is an easier way to do this in PHP, but this is the easiest way that I found to alternate the color of rows in a table. First you want to set a variable to 0, I used the variable i in this example, but you can really use anything. Then you want to go and check if the variable can be divided by two. If it can then it’s even and you set the color to any color you want. Obviously if it cannot be divided by two then it is even and you set an else statement to set those another color. This will therefore set the even rows one color and the odd rows another. At the end of the while loop you want to add one to your variable (example: i+1).

See below for an example.

That’s basically it. My next article will be about how to display PHP code. I found it to be a little more difficult to do this so I think it will be good to