Developer tools

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

LinkedIn is releasing today an update of its tools for developers. New functions will allow Web developers to embed member or company profiles on Web sites, including listings of who the user knows in common with other people, or who he or she knows at a company. The Sign In with LinkedIn feature has been updated to be callable from Javascript.

To differentiate from that other, much larger social network, LinkedIn is strongly pushing the professional nature of its network. As LinkedIn vice president of product management Adam Nash says, "There are a lot of apps where it's … Read more

Adobe Systems has proposed a standard that could make it easier to create Web pages with fancy layouts seen more often in magazines.

The company proposed a technology it calls CSS Regions (PDF) yesterday to the World Wide Web Consortium, which standardizes the Cascading Style Sheets technology widely used to control formatting on Web pages. Adobe also described the technology at a CSS Working Group meeting in Silicon Valley.

"This proposal is intended to support sophisticated, magazine-style layouts using CSS," said Arno Gourdol, director of engineering for runtime foundation at Adobe, in a mailing list posting.

The proposal … Read more

Steve Jobs thinks that HTML5 is the future of media-rich content on the Web, and eventually he might be right. But Web designers and their clients are working with Flash now, so to address this schism between the two, Adobe Labs today unveiled a new free tool called Wallaby that will convert Flash into HTML5.

Originally demonstrated at Adobe's MAX 2010 conference, the conversion process is currently workable but rough, said Adobe Flash Professional Senior Product Manager Tom Barclay. "HTML5 will be an important technology for banner ads and Web publishing," he said but cautioned that Flash … Read more

Stack Exchange, the company behind Stack Overflow, the influential-among-programmers Q&A site, is taking another stab at a revenue model for the service by launching a jobs board for its users at the Launch Conference in San Francisco today. It's the first presenting company at this conference. (There is a live video feed from Launch on Ustream.)

Previously, Stack Exchange had charged for the hosting of "white label" Q&A sites, but that model didn't work. In April of 2010 the Stack Exchange sites became free. Influence of the Stack Overflow site (the biggest … Read more

Google has passed a significant milestone with the release of its first version of Native Client, a software foundation designed to let Web-based applications tap into a person's computer chip.

The software, called Arctic Sea, is available built into Chrome 10, which entered beta testing yesterday. "A big goal of this release is to enable developers to start building Native Client modules for Chrome applications," product manager Christian Stefansen said of the Native Client release in a blog post today.

Native Client--NaCl for short--is an unusual approach to the challenge of letting people download software over the … Read more