Aaron’s Potlatch

Recently I have been working on Demisauce, an open source Software as a Service project to provide services to other applications. Some colleagues of mine were trying to solve a problem at work that involved integration of voting and commenting capability into an existing software application (.NET) using a service approach.  Meanwhile, i was working on a tool to allow a “help overlay” to overlay parts of a web page with a dialog type box of content managed by Demisauce but shown within the browser of a page served by my application.

While talking about where Demisauce is headed, the need to incorporate “services” that are both server to server communication, as well as browser to server became apparent.

Diagram showing services that are both browser to server, and server to server.

With the browser more and more being the controller of MVC architecture, it is aggregating content (mashup) into  a single view and application.  However, that content comes from multiple servers.   However, again, the need to have services such as commenting applications, comments, help, etc that are usable within your web application as a “private” application (internal corporate software applications) instead of the web2.0 consumer/public model prevalent in mashups today.

The services we have targeted initially for this are the help application, to be able to pop open an overlay/dialog box of “help” contextual to your page or application, but have the content for that managed on Demisauce.  To allow for feedback on pages, and the management of that feedback (has anyone processed it), for generic content, email templates, etc.