Google has announced the release of some of its core application development tools as open source. The Closure tools, which include the Closure Compiler, Closure Library, Closure Templates, and Closure Inspector, have been used by Google to develop its popular Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps web applications.
The Closure Compiler is a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster. It compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what’s left. There is an online version which you can …

Charles Ying over at satine.org has put together an impressive demo using Safari’s forthcoming CSS 3D transform features. Below is the YouTube video of the demo.
The demo, titled Snow Stack, displays a wall of photos in three dimensions and allows you to navigate across the wall using your arrow keys. The wall of photos seems to go on into infinity while it dynamically loads the photos from Flickr as you travel across it.
Here’s the video of Snow Stack:

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The Mono developer team has now released version 2.4.2 of the open source .NET development framework. The latest version of Mono is a maintenance release and includes more than 150 bug fixes. It is, however, also the first version to support the ASP.NET MVC framework, which has been available under an open source licence, the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), since the beginning of April.

Related links:
Mono 2.4.2 with ASP.NET MVC support – News – The H Open Source: News and Features
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Two and a half years after the release of PHP 5.2.0 and following a slight delay, the PHP development team have announced the release version 5.3.0 of PHP. Version 5.3.0 of the web programming language includes several fundamental new extensions, as well as a number of other new features and is the one of the biggest revisions in PHP’s history. Many of the functions originally planned for PHP 6 have ended up in the 5.3 development pipeline.
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Developers wishing to create dynamic websites, web applications and web services with a database back end are presented with two main stream choices. Develop for PHP and MySQL or ASP.NET and possibly Microsoft SQL Server. Both technologies have their strengths and weaknesses and there are those who biased towards one technology over the other. How do PHP and ASP.NET compare?
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Mono 2.0 has been released and will be available for Windows, Linux and OS X.
Mono 2.0 contains an API complete implementation of .Net’s System.Windows.Forms (winforms) namespace, allowing winforms applications to run on Linux, MacOX and other Unix systems.
Mono 2.0 is a major milestone in the Mono project, and it supports the following features:

ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases.
ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing Web-based applications.
Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.
System.XML 2.0: An API to manipulate XML documents.
System.Core: Provides support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).
System.Xml.Linq: Provides a LINQ provider for …

Standardization efforts for the next version of JavaScript have taken a sharp turn this month, with some key changes in the Web scripting technology’s direction. JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla, has helped forge a consensus on how to proceed with the direction for JavaScript’s improvements. “JavaScript was sitting still. It was stagnant,” he says.
The fundamental reason to update JavaScript — whose standard hasn’t changed since 1999 — is to handle the heavy demands being placed on it. Although the language certainly has caught on for Web application development, …

Linux.com have a feature on using DrasticGrid. DrasticGrid is an Ajax-based datagrid with editing support. It uses MySQL as a data source and it supports pagination, sorting, editing records, adding records and removing records. Pagination is implemented efficiently, only the visible data is sent to the browser. The grid is configurable in many ways, you may specify wich columns are shown, and which are editable.
DrasticGrid is one of three controls from DrasticData — the others are a tag cloud and Google Maps controller, both of which also get their data …

Mac OS X Leopard comes with a built-in web server (Apache) and with PHP version 5 (5.2.4 to be precise). This makes OS X a great web development platform out of the box and it comes. While there are 3rd party Apache/PHP/MySQL packages like MAMP, XAMP it isn’t hard to get the native PHP and Apache working.
There is a great article on this here.
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Microsoft announced today the release of Silverlight 1.0 for Windows and Mac and support for Moonlight, a Linux implementation of Silverlight. Up until today Microsoft was a bit standoffish toward Moonlight, but today something changed in Microsoft land. They’ve announced support for internal specification and test suite as well as access to codecs, more details here.
So why is this “important”? You can pretty much do everything that Silverlight does with Flash.  The change is under the hood so to speak. Flash uses a binary file format (.swf) to package the content. Silverlight …