Securing Ajax Applications

July 2007
$49.99 US, $59.99 CAN
ISBN: 9780596529314
250 pgs
Shelving: web programming
User Level: intermediate to
advanced web developers
Will Sell Like:
0596101805, Ajax Design Patterns
Securing Ajax Applications
By Christopher wells

In addition to the responsiveness that makes Ajax so appealing, Ajax can also create
security laws that need to be addressed at the development stage. Securing Ajax Applications examines the challenges created by the new generation of web development, exploring these structures and looking for dangerous gaps.
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MANAGING THE METADATA OVERLOAD

The Metadata palette provides much more information than the average person will ever need. If you don't need all this "metadata overload," you can set it up so it only displays the data you care about, giving you a more orderly, easier-to-read Metadata palette. To do this, go to the Metadata tab, click on the right-facing triangle button to the right of the tab, and from the pop-down menu, choose Metadata Display Options. In the dialog that appears, uncheck any fields you don't need displayed, turn on the Checkbox at the bottom for Hide Empty Fields, and click OK.

HAVE PHOTOSHOP SELECT THE SHADOWS AND HIGHLIGHTS

This is a trick we use for prepress and for photo retouching because it instantly lets you select all the shadow areas (or highlight areas if you wish) for a particular image, and it's so easy because Photoshop does all the work. To have Photoshop select just the shadow areas in your image, go under the Select menu and choose Color Range. When the dialog appears, in the Select pop-up menu, choose Shadows, and click OK. The Shadow areas are instantly selected. This is ideal for situations where your scanner has plugged up the detail in the shadow areas (pretty common in most sub-$1,000 desktop scanners). Once the shadows are selected, you can "open them up" by going to Levels and moving the Midtone Input Levels slider to the left to bring back some of the shadow detail lost in the scan.

TROUBLESHOOTING ACTIONS? SLOW DOWN!

If you're an advanced user, chances are you're no stranger to using actions, and in fact, you probably create your own (rather than using the default actions that ship with Photoshop, many of which redefine the term "useless"). If you do create your own actions, you've already found that you spend more time troubleshooting your actions than you do creating them in the first place. Well, this little tip makes the troubleshooting process a lot easier, and saves you both time and frustration. The problem is (and this won't sound like a problem) Photoshop runs actions so quickly that you don't see each step, or each dialog, so tracking down a missing or wrong step is just about impossible. Luckily, you can actually slow down your action, or even put a pause between each step, by using Photoshop's Playback Options dialog found in the Actions palette's pop-down menu. When it appears, you can choose to play your action Step by Step, seeing everything as it happens, or you can choose to enter the number of seconds you'd like it to pause. Then, when you replay the action, you can see everything step by step and track down the culprit.