Lee Provoost at Capgemini just learned about Jaxer, and he's challenging us to set up a Jaxer Pet Shop. OK, that's the kind of challenge we love, so of course we'll take him up on it. Especially because we don't want his heart to stop beating for too long:

"Yesterday, I bought a new Apple computer and I was happily installing and configuring my Eclipse environment and of course the must-have for every web-developer: Aptana! One of the big problems with JavaScript and Ajax programming is that there are barely good development environments. Syntax highlighting can be handled by most IDEs, but when it comes to complex code completion and assistance, nothing can beat Aptana as far as I know. You can either install it standalone or as an Eclipse plugin. So I surfed to the website of Aptana to get my plugin, but suddenly I stumbled on Aptana Jaxer. What caught my I was the following sentence: “Jaxer, The world’s first Ajax server”. My heart stopped beating, my whole (young) life passed by and I was thinking: "gosh, I thought I’ve seen it all…""

In fact we're thinking of building two pet shops (neither of which will ever sell any real pets unless they're of the Tamagotchi variety, btw):

1. One that's end-to-end Ajax, showing how much simpler it is to develop Ajax apps when you can stay in one paradigm, and giving some ideas of how to architect full-fledged Jaxer apps;
2. And one that's built on top of a Java Pet Shop, perhaps leveraging the DWR integration to Java we're now working on, to show how you can easily have the best of both worlds: the strength of an enterprise Java app with the engaging user interaction afforded by Ajax. We'll see how you end up with increased security and a clean division of labor between business logic in Java and the user-oriented application flow in Ajax (on both client and server).

Actually, we'll probably just build the first iterations of these, and then solicit the community's help to define better application infrastructure for Jaxer. People are already working on some ORMs for Jaxer, so I'm sure there will be some exciting conversations.