| Macromedia built the Pet Market blueprint application
to demonstrate how usable Rich Internet Applications can be developed
with the Macromedia MX family of products.
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.
In building Pet Market, we focused on the potential of Macromedia
MX to deliver intuitive, responsive, and effective user experiences.
By using a ubiquitous rich client—the Macromedia Flash Player—and
an open n-tier application architecture based on ColdFusion MX,
Pet Market features a rich user interface that utilizes less bandwidth.
Most importantly, Pet Market illustrates the simple and elegant
service-oriented architecture of Macromedia MX through the ColdFusion
MX server scripting environment. ColdFusion MX enables a wide
range of RAD and script-level developers to access the power of
object-based component development, rich client/server models
and web services without the pain of complex frameworks.
Our aim is that the developer community at large – including
.NET and J2EE developers – will be able to engage with Pet
Market to explore the potential of Macromedia MX. To that end,
we have built Flash front ends that skin both the Java™
Pet Store and Microsoft .NET Pet Shop to illustrate how Macromedia
MX can extend and enhance the Java and .NET platforms.
Pet Market is not intended to be a feature showdown with other
blueprint applications that have been implemented on other platforms,
even though there may be those who will compare Pet Market, the
Java™ Pet Store, and .NET Pet Shop for the quality of the
user experience and the elegance of the server-side code that
powers it. The true measure of the Pet Market blueprint application
will be in its ability to help developers everywhere explore the
new paradigm of Rich Internet Applications.
Happy coding!
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