Pragmatic Objects has released Pragmatic JPetStore, described by the company as the first Pet Store to “focus on both AJAX and security at the same time”. The purpose is to demonstrate a very realistic secure AJAX Java implementation of the Sun Petstore blueprint.

It is believed this is the one of the first Petstores which has the AJAX  flavor and certainly the first one that focuses on both AJAX and security at the same time. The pragmatic AJAX jPetstore is built on rock solid technologies: Struts, Mr Persister ORM and JSON-RPC-Java.
Highlights/philosophy of using AJAX  in building this application are:

1. Ajax is used judiciously.
2. Gracefully turns into a traditional web application if JavaScript is disabled on the client's browsers.
3. Secure. Switching between HTTP and HTTPS is seamless.
4. Supports both IE 6.x and Firefox 1.x.
5. In Ajax mode, calls are asynchronous. Visual cues are available.
6. Simply works and works right.

Underlying internals:
1. Well known design patterns like MVC and DAO were applied in the design.
2. Built on rock solid technologies: Struts, MrPersister ORM and JSON-RPC-Java.
3. Is multi-tiered architected, but avoids the heavy weight of EJB and the unnecessary complexity of XML as in many other frameworks.
4. Deployed on Tomcat 5.5.x running on Linux Suse 10.0, sitting behind an Apache HTTP server (connected via mod_jk).
5. Database is powered by MySQL, but should work for all other RDBMS where JDBC drivers are available.
6. Bandwidth of the demo system is 512 Kbps. Imagine how much faster if we run the demo on higher bandwidth.

To check out the demo visit www.pragmaticobjects.com/ajax-petstore