Developer Center Article

This document answers some of the most frequently asked questions about the Pet Market blueprint application.

General questions about Pet Market

Questions about accessibility

Questions about deployability

Questions about using Macromedia products used in Pet Market

Questions about performance

Pet Market is a blueprint application that demonstrates the power of building Rich Internet Applications with the Macromedia MX family of tool, server, and client technologies. Pet Market is a fictitious online pet store that allows users to browse the store's inventory, learn more about specific pets, and purchase pets—the same basic activities that any online retailer needs to offer. Pet Market is intended to illustrate how Rich Internet Applications can extend the web without replacing it by enabling a significantly more intuitive, responsive, and effective user experiences.

Macromedia built the Pet Market blueprint application to demonstrate how Rich Internet Applications can be developed with the Macromedia MX family of products. Developers can use Pet Market as a model to help them develop best practices for architecture, coding, and team organization.

We chose to build an online store for a fictional pet retailer similar to the Java™ Pet Store released by Sun and the Microsoft .NET Pet Shop. Both of these applications use the page-browsing model of the web.

While the web provides an excellent user experience for browsing content, we believe the current user experience for web applications makes even simple activities like online shopping too difficult, and more complex interactions like those in traditional client/server and desktop applications almost impossible.

It is unlikely that we will be seeing many real online pet store businesses in the near future, but Pet Market can be used as a model for a wide variety of applications that can be built with Macromedia MX. Other sample applications built with Macromedia MX include a car dealer extranet, an address book, an online record store, and a product configurator.

No. Pet Market is a fictitious business and Macromedia would never participate in a business that might result in cruelty to animals.

There are four distributions available:

The Pet Market blueprint applications are intended for use with the ColdFusion MX rapid server scripting environment and Macromedia Flash MX. There are two versions depending on the operating system you choose. Developers interested in the Macromedia MX family of technologies should download the Pet Market blueprint application.

The Macromedia Flash MX front-ends are intended to "skin" the Java Pet Store running on JRun 4 or the Microsoft .NET Pet Shop. You must have the Java Pet Store or the Microsoft .NET Pet Shop running before you can install the Macromedia Flash MX front-ends for that platform. (For your convenience, we have available a download for the Java Pet Shop configured for JRun 4).

J2EE developers should download the Macromedia Flash MX front-end for the Java Pet Store while Microsoft .NET developers should download the Macromedia Flash MX front-end for the Microsoft .NET Pet Shop.

The Flash front-ends in each case are functionally all the same.

Macromedia built the Pet Market blueprint application to showcase the potential of Rich Internet Applications built with Macromedia MX family of products, including ColdFusion MX, Macromedia Flash MX, Dreamweaver MX, and Fireworks MX.

The team developed the Macromedia Flash front-end of Pet Market to work with the ColdFusion MX rapid server scripting environment. In order to showcase the interoperability of the Macromedia Flash MX front-end with the J2EE and Microsoft .NET platforms, Macromedia also decided to "skin" the Java Pet Store and the Microsoft .NET Pet Shop with the Macromedia Flash front-ends.

Each package contains the Pet Market server-side components, Macromedia Flash components, and full source code including the Macromedia FLA files and ActionScript files.

You need the following:

Optional: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Macromedia Fireworks MX

Note: The ColdFusion MX Server Developer Edition is a free version of ColdFusion MX Server that is limited to use by a single developer on a single workstation. It supports all of the features of ColdFusion MX Server Enterprise Edition but is limited to access by a single IP address. ColdFusion MX Server Developer Edition is included with the Windows version of Macromedia Studio MX.

Macromedia Software

Java Pet Store

Rich Internet Applications like the Pet Market blueprint application can be made with any edition of ColdFusion MX. However, to simplify distribution and installation, The Pet Market blueprint application distribution contains a .car file ColdFusion Archive which requires the archive and deploy feature of ColdFusion MX. This feature is not included in the ColdFusion MX Professional Edition. If you are using ColdFusion MX Professional Edition, you will have to carefully follow the manual installation instructions to ensure the files are properly extracted and deployed.

The Pet Market blueprint application was tested with ColdFusion MX on:

The Macromedia Flash MX front-end for Java Pet Store was tested with JRun 4 on:

The Macromedia Flash MX front-end for Microsoft .NET Pet Shop was tested with version 1.0 of the ASP.NET framework on:

The client-side portions of Pet Market can be explored with Macromedia Flash MX and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX on the Macintosh. There currently is not a shipping version of ColdFusion MX for the Macintosh. However, some developers have succeeded in getting both ColdFusion MX and JRun 4 working on OS X. If you are successful in getting Pet Market to run on ColdFusion or a J2EE server on the Macintosh, we would love to hear from you.

The current version of Pet Market is version 1.2.

Currently, there are no localized versions of the Pet Market.

Known issues are detailed in the Pet Market Known Issues page.

Pet Market leverages the Macromedia Flash UI Components to provide a fully keyboard-navigable application enabling accessibility for motor-impaired users as well as providing familiar navigation methods for experienced web users.

No, the current implementation of the Pet Market blueprint application does not support screen readers. Macromedia Flash Player has integrated support for Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA). MSAA serves as a bridge between Macromedia Flash Player and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes screen reader from GW Micro. Learn more about accessibility in Macromedia Flash MX.

The client side of Pet Market is deployable to virtually all web browsers and operating systems. Macromedia Flash Player 6 (build 6,0,40,0) is needed on the client side and can be downloaded for free from the Macromedia web site.

The server side of Pet Market requires server software, such as ColdFusion MX with Macromedia Flash Remoting. The Macromedia Flash MX front-end for the Java Pet Store requires a J2EE server (such as JRun 4) with Flash Remoting for J2EE. The Flash front-end for Microsoft .NET Pet Shop requires the Microsoft ASP.NET Framework and Macromedia Flash Remoting for .NET.

The Macromedia Flash player is the leading rich client for Internet content and applications across the broadest range of platforms. Using Macromedia Flash MX for the client side of a web application will actually increase the dependability of your deployed code across operating systems and browsers. If a user has Macromedia Flash Player 6 installed, your application will function as you designed it. Learn more about the penetration of the Flash player.

Rich Internet Applications extend the web without replacing it, enabling the development of applications that offer significantly more intuitive, responsive, and effective user experiences. By using a ubiquitous rich client—Macromedia Flash Player—that runs in browsers and on devices, and an open n-tier application architecture, Rich Internet Applications enable more-complex user interfaces, two-way communications, and high-performance business applications that can be delivered with existing network and enterprise infrastructure.

Rich Internet Applications not only increase website functionality, but also reduce overall operational costs by lowering bandwidth usage. This is achieved by reducing page requests and compressing data transfer, and by lightening the server load by moving processing to the client. Learn more about Macromedia MX.

No. Macromedia Flash and HTML fulfill two different roles and HTML will be the dominant model for web interaction for the foreseeable future. However, while HTML is an excellent language for sharing documents, it is not well-suited to complex user interaction. Technologies like JavaScript and DHTML do not work reliably across browsers and platforms. The ubiquitous Macromedia Flash Player handles user interaction on the client smoothly, easily, and predictably across a wide variety of platforms and browsers. Learn more about the Macromedia point of view on Macromedia Flash and HTML in JD's forum.

The Pet Market team used Dreamweaver MX to write server-side and client-side code. Dreamweaver MX includes features for introspecting, creating, and editing the ColdFusion Components that form the core of the Pet Market server APIs. Dreamweaver MX also provides support for editing and managing ActionScripts, including color coding and code hints. Most importantly, Dreamweaver let the team work in a single environment to quickly create, build, and manage the assets for the Pet Market application. Visit the Macromedia Dreamweaver MX site for more information.

The Pet Market team used Macromedia Flash MX to develop the user interface and client side logic. Macromedia Flash MX includes core set of pre-built, customizable components for common application interfaces, including scrollbars, rich text fields, input buttons, radio buttons and check boxes, and list and combo boxes. Visit the Macromedia Flash MX site for more information.

Macromedia Flash Remoting simplifies the Macromedia Flash MX application development process by providing a powerful yet simple programming model and runtime that enables Flash to connect to remote services exposed by application servers and web services.

Yes. You will need both the Macromedia Flash Remoting components (installed into Macromedia Flash MX) and the Macromedia Flash Remoting services.

You must download the Flash Remoting Components for the Macromedia Flash development environment.

Macromedia Flash Remoting services are a native feature of both ColdFusion MX and JRun 4. Installing a commercial version or a trial version of ColdFusion MX or JRun will install Flash Remoting services on your server.

ColdFusion MX lets you easily build Rich Internet Applications that integrate with databases, XML, web services, Macromedia Flash MX, and more. ColdFusion MX empowers developers with a productive scripting environment and integrated search and charting capabilities. You can deploy on industry-standard operating systems and harness the power of the Java and .NET platforms with the legendary ease of use of ColdFusion. Learn more about ColdFusion MX. Learn more about how ColdFusion was used in Pet Market.

Macromedia designed Pet Market as a learning tool. There are many performance optimizations that could be applied to the Pet Market application including code and file size optimization. Macromedia intends to ship a performance-tuned version of Pet Market to illustrate the best practices of performance tuning in the future.

Because Macromedia Flash MX is capable of performing many application activities locally, fewer server transactions are necessary. Once a Macromedia Flash application has loaded, it can be dynamically updated to reflect a change in state or new data. It is not necessary, as with HTML, to load a new page in order to show the results of a server transaction. The download process itself can be optimized so that the user only downloads the parts of the application he or she needs immediately, while additional components of the application can be downloaded in the background.

At this time no performance benchmark studies have been conducted that include Pet Market. Macromedia is considering creating a high-performance version of Pet Market for benchmarking purposes.

On the server, the Pet Market blueprint application is built with the ColdFusion MX server scripting environment, which ensures high performance and reliability by leveraging the full power of the Java technology platform. The Macromedia Flash MX front-end for the Java Pet Store harnesses the power of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), while the Flash front-end for the Microsoft .NET Pet Shop leverages the Microsoft .NET framework. On the client, Pet Market uses the Macromedia Flash Player for dynamic updating, background downloading, and overall reduced transaction loads. Learn more about the standalone performance of Pet Market on ColdFusion MX.

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