GoodDemo Architecture – Recording Component Part 1

[Gil Shabat (Novologies)]

Hello everyone,

This is the first post of many that will focus on one or two aspects
of GoodDemo’s architecture. The main purpose of these points is to
share how we do things and discuss different options and ideas. So
please feel free to comment on anything (even if it’s only vaguely
related to the current topic.)

OK – now for today’s post - as Brian mentioned, there are two parts to
GoodDemo – a recording component to allow users to record a demo of a
website and a playback component to allow anyone to view and
experiment with the demo created.

Let’s first cover a few aspects of the recording component. To record
new demos, we envision users going to the main page of their chosen
website or web application and directly inserting some custom GoodDemo
functionality into it. This custom functionality would interact
directly with the website (possibly through JavaScript) and would
offer recording and visual effects. It would also enable the recorded
demo to be saved to the GoodDemo site.

With this in mind, we have two main technical challenges to overcome:

(1) adding our own recording functionality (possibly with JavaScript
or a Silverlight component that would interact with the DOM) to the
website without forcing users to install anything on their web server
or desktop.

(2) dealing with cross domain browser limitations to allow the
recording component to interact with the site and send & receive data
to and from the GoodDemo site.

In the next 1 or 2 posts I’ll further detail these challenges and how
we might go about overcoming them. Although Brian hinted to what we
might do to for the first challenge, please feel free to offer your
own insight and potential approaches. I’m looking forward to the
discussions and working with everyone.

Gil