Developer tools

Adobe has begun putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to improving Web page design.

Today, the first bit of Adobe-written code landed in the WebKit browser engine project, an early step to try to bring magazine-style layouts to Web pages using an extension to today's CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) technology. Adobe calls the technology CSS Regions.

The move begins fulfilling a plan Adobe announced in May to build the technology into WebKit and--if the company can persuade others to embrace it--furthers Adobe's ambition to standardize the advanced CSS layout mechanism.

WebKit is the browser … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Somewhat later than had been planned last year, Google is addressing a significant weaknesses of Google Docs and Google Apps: the inability to use the services while not connected to the Net.

"We will make them [Google Docs offline apps] available this summer," said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, in an interview here last week at at the Google I/O conference. "We've all been using it internally. It's imminent. We want to make sure they're good."

It's not clear just how high the demand for the feature is. … Read more

Step aside, Google Docs, there's a new JavaScript tour de force in town.

I'm talking about the latest project from programmer Fabrice Bellard, a JavaScript program that emulates an x86 processor fast enough to run Linux in a Web browser.

The JavaScript PC Emulator can do the work of an Intel 486 chip from the 1990s, but doesn't have a built-in floating point unit for numeric processing, Bellard said. Happily, Linux itself can emulate that, and a version of the operating system's core--2.6.20--runs on the foundation.

Bellard published a technical description of the JavaScript PC Emulator … Read more

Go, Google's experimental programming language, is coming to the company's App Engine cloud-computing service--and a bit closer to reality in the process.

Google hopes to use Go to tackle modern programming challenges such as getting useful work out of chips with multiple processor cores. Getting new languages to catch on is difficult, though--it took Sun Microsystems years with Java, and its Fortress never really caught on widely.

But incorporating Go into App Engine could help make it more relevant, or at least easier to test out, by reducing the hassles involved in trying it. App Engine is a … Read more

Editor's note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component below. Replaying the event will give you all the live updates along with commentary from our readers and CNET reporters. For those of you who just want the updates, we've included them in regular text here. To get the key points from today's announcement, you can check out our summary of what got announced, in our story here.

Google I/O day one was about Android and music, but the second … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Hoping to bring magazine-style layout tools to Web publishing, Adobe Systems tonight released a prototype browser specifically designed to let Web developers test the company's proposed formatting technology.

The technology, called CSS Regions, lets programmers easily create multi-column layouts, place text in various polygonal shapes, and flow around objects in the middle of text. That technology has existed for years in the print publishing world, but it's generally missing from the Web, and its absence grows ever more conspicuous as magazines and newspapers move to digital publishing, especially on tablets such as Apple's iPad.

The formatting … Read more

A company at the heart of the Web-app revolution hopes a major update to its programming tools will further the new style of development.

Sencha plans to release Ext JS 4.0 today, bringing new features and some maturity to the software. Ext JS is a software foundation that lets programmers create Web sites that house active applications, not just static pages, that work not just on modern browsers but also on Microsoft's ancient, despised, but still widely used IE6.

Web programming these days is getting steadily more advanced, and indeed Web browsers are becoming more like operating systems … Read more

Mozilla, taking interest in the Node.js project to run JavaScript programs on servers, not just browsers, has passed an early milestone with its own flavor of the software.

Node.js is built with the V8 JavaScript engine from Google's Chrome browser, but Mozilla is transplanting Firefox's JavaScript technology in a project called SpiderNode. (The JavaScript engine in Firefox is called SpiderMonkey, and the hybrid technology used in SpiderNode is called V8Monkey.)

"We now have a Node executable running on V8Monkey," though it still crashes at this early stage, said SpiderNode project member Paul O'Shannessy … Read more

Adobe Systems is something of an industry punching bag in some circles for offering software wedded to a personal computer era we're supposedly outgrowing.

It's time to update that corporate image.

As part of the debut of Creative Suite 5.5, the company today announced a collection of new software that includes three iPad applications; Flash tools better at creating content that reaches devices beyond PCs; and developer tools that bring some of Adobe's strength in design tools to the Web standards world of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

It's not going to be enough to placate … Read more