I came across this snazzy presentation on HTML 5 recently. The presentation is actually written using HTML 5, and both discusses and demonstrates some of the planned features for the new standard (note that how well it works will depend upon the browser you’re using; it worked well for me under Firefox). The first dozen slides highlight new JavaScript APIs, including the ability to store data on the client and to perform Geolocation. The rest of the presentation covers additions to HTML and CSS. Besides being nice looking, the presentation approaches the subjects exactly as I like to see: with sample code and a visual example built into each frame.

Of course, who actually knows when HTML 5 will come out and how quickly or well it’ll be adopted!

, I made some suggestions as to how one develops and tests a site from a security perspective. Here I want to cover security as a general philosophy, so you understand that approach I take (and, therefore, the approach I would recommend you take). When I explain things, I think in terms of analogies. I’m pretty sure they don’t always work or help, but still, it’s what I do. And the analogy I have for Web site (or application) security is: Security is Next to Godliness. Which is to say, think of security the way you might think about cleanliness.

I StumbledUpon this article titled Making a Cool Login System with PHP, MySQL, and jQuery. It’s very slick, with a panel that slides down for the users to login or register. The article includes the complete code and a demo version. I like this approach—a separate login panel—because logging in is common to most sites but also something the user only does once per session at most, so it’s best not to take up screen space with a login form.

to a site.

The tutorial goes on to talk about organizing HTML files: CSS at the top and JavaScript at the bottom. I’ve heard this before (about putting JavaScript right before the closing tag) but haven’t gotten around to testing it myself. It makes sense, though, as the browser doesn’t need the JavaScript to render the output for the user to see, and because the JavaScript code itself probably can’t do its thing until the HTML has loaded. If you keep reading, you’ll learn how to use CSS image sprites to minimize the number of images that have to be downloaded by the browser. My Web site has practically no images, so I haven’t used this myself, but it’s something that can dramatically improve the performance of a site.

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• On the Blog => A Simple Approach to Site Security
• On the Web => BumpTop, the Snazz Desktop App
• On the Web => Excerpt from “Effortless Flex 4 Development”
• On the Web => DMC Insights, Inc. Reaches a Million Hits
• Q&A => What’s your current development setup?
• Q&A => How do I get published?
• Q&A => How do I automatically backup my databases?
• What is Larry Thinking? => Coming Full Circle
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => Effortless Fles 4 Development

About This Newsletter

Answers to some questions, a couple of interesting things I’ve seen online…all this and more in my latest newsletter! As always, thanks for reading, and for your feedback and questions.

On the Blog => A Simple Approach to Site Security

I write about security quite a bit in my books, but normally (because of the format of the books), the focus is on individual techniques. I’m trying to put together some posts on my blog that look at the bigger picture and more of the general thinking. To start, I wrote one called " A Simple Approach to Site Security". In it, I both talk about security from a programming perspective, starting with the database even, and then how I simply test the security of my sites by trying a few basic things.

Peachpit Press, publisher of my forthcoming “Effortless Flex 4 Development” book, has published an excerpt of the book online, free for anyone to read. (Technically New Riders is the publisher, but New Riders is owned by Peachpit.) The article represents the first several pages from Chapter 4 of the book, “Event Management”. Even if you don’t yet know Flex and ActionScript, you should still be able to follow along. Most importantly, Flex is largely an event-driven approach to application development (conversely, Flash Professional is primarily a timeline-driven approach), so this section is really a key insight into what it’s like to use Flex.

I believe another excerpt from the book will be published soon, and I’m currently working on two “5 Tips in 5 Days” blog posts for Peachpit’s site. One will be specifically on the Flex 4 framework and the other will be on Flash Builder. Flash Builder, in case you’re not familiar with it, used to be called Flex Builder and is just a commercial IDE for developing using Flex. You don’t have to use Flash Builder as the Flex 4 framework and its SDK are available for free, but it does ease the process significantly. The book does not assume you’re using Flash Builder, either. There are specific instructions for how to create Flex applications using a text editor and the command-line IDE, but there are also areas that cover how you would do X or Y using Flash Builder. Most of the book focuses on the Flex framework, so it doesn’t matter what development tools you’re using.