Google Web Toolkit adds HTML5 canvas backing

15.02.2011
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.

But (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 , 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.