We received a lot of useful feedback from many of you who downloaded the initial version of Pet Market. Your suggestions included usability, architectural, and configuration enhancements. Our primary focus in this update was incorporating your feedback into the application. The following is what we focused on for the Pet Market Version 1.2 release:

• Changed the startup process so you can now interact with the application before the entire application is initialized. You can now begin to navigate through the store while top-level navigation appearing in the upper right part of the screen is rendering.
• Stripped the comments from the Macromedia Flash Detection Kit files. Removing the comments eliminated up to 10K bytes of data transfer at Pet Market startup.
• We staggered the initialization of the checkout widget through multiple frames to improve the responsiveness of the application during startup.
• We analyzed the traffic between the client and the server and discovered that cart add/update/delete operations were almost always followed by a query of the count and dollar value of the cart contents. Based on this, we modified the cart add/update/delete operations to return the count and dollar value. This improves the responsiveness of cart operations and reduces the number of requests the server has to process.

For more information about the changes, visit the updated performance article.

Support for 800 x 600 screen resolution
Many of you indicated that your clients don’t have high resolution monitors, which made it impossible to use Pet Market as an example of a new interaction model for multi-step applications. We made these changes to address this issue:

• We added a scaled 800 x 600 pixel version of the application. To access the 800 x 600 version, change the end of the URL to store_800.html. Note that the store.html URL continues to bring you to the 1024 x 768 pixel version.
• Some of the type was difficult to read at 800 x 600 version, so we made some color changes to improve type readability at the lower resolution.

Enhanced Comments
We have added some additional source code comments, including new ReadMe files in each directory of the client source tree.

ColdFusion MX Professional Support
We updated the installation script for Pet Market running with ColdFusion MX on Windows to address installing on ColdFusion MX Professional.

If you haven’t downloaded the Pet Market blueprint application files, we invite you to do so. If you’ve worked with Pet Market Version 1.0, we encourage you to download this new version to see the improvements. And as always, we encourage you to send us feedback with your comments.