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

What is a web application? A web application, also known as the ‘webapp’, is an application that can be easily accessible through a web browser over the internet. A web application is coded languages such as PHP, ColdFusion, and Asp.net combined with in a markup language like HTML.  What are the many benefits of a webapp? For one thing, web applications are cross platform compatible. Unlike certain software, which may only work on a Windows machine of a Mac machine, web applications have the ability to work across many different kinds of software such as internet explorer, Firefox, Safari as well as many different kinds of operating systems such as Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Web applications are also extremely cost efficient. They have much lower maintenance and support costs than software as well.

Another benefit of the webapp is that you will never have to install an application on your computer to take up hard drive space. A webapp will always occupy a virtual cloud of space on the internet. Web Apps also allow you to constantly have the most up-to-date software. No more upgrade fees!

Web Applications are also available anywhere and anytime! This is huge – similar to the way you can access your email from any browser, any computer, etc., you can also access any web applications from anywhere.

With webapps you can also stress less about viruses.  Webapps require no  installation, which  means no viruses (unless you were to just get a Mac then you would never have that problem). The biggest benefit of all (in my opinion) is that mobile has arrived- allowing us to take our web apps anywhere our cell phones go.
Black Rhino Solution Inc’s Favorite Applications:
1.        Facebook (social networking site)
2.        Google Wave (an email and collaboration tool)
3.       Mint (a site to keep track of all your finances)
4.       Kuler (a color application to find colors that match and work good together)
5.       Google Maps (a map application)
6.       You Tube (Video application)
7.       Go To meeting (a virtual meeting application)
8.       WordPress (blogging application)