You all have the chance to use the emulator to test our metaphor, and experience how it works (please dedicate 3 minutes of your time to our anonymous evaluation). Our presentation page presents the design rationale along with the basic functions. However, when I present the emulator to people (in person) there’s a question that always pops out: how did you do it? what platform is it based on?
Answers are pretty simple: we started by extending the blog (based on Wordpress) with some plug-ins available on the Web, and I wrote some more from scratch to implement the functionalities we needed. The emulator has then been designed to rely on the same database as Wordpress, so to share data with the website. We had different options available to develop the emulator: Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and AJAX to mention the basic three. The first two require plugins to run code, even if everyone who’s ever seen a video on the Web surely has a Flash plugin installed, and we did not like the idea of being tied to proprietary technology for a product. We are using Flash for experiments like the concept evaluation, but the emulator had to be different: interactive and as consistent as possible with itsme vision. AJAX seemed then to be the only viable solution, and it seemed to us sufficintly flexible for granting future evolution of the software. We had then to choose among different solutions and frameworks (e.g., Zend, GWT) and, we opted for GWT: Google’s toolkit allowing to deploy applications on a Tomcat server. Indeed, we are listed in the GWT App Gallery.
Technically, the relations among the elements we are combining for the website and the emulator are presented in the picture below:
Our custom components are the highlighted ones, and those are probably where the products can evolve to be refined or even reused in other contexts. All others are somehow standard (actually, this is a simplified version and I omitted some parts, leaving just those characterizing the project).
One of the other questions that I often receive about the Wordpress customization: why did not use Buddypress or something like that? Simply because it was not available when we started implementing our website – it’s been quite a long process. I would have really liked to rely on something more widespread, instead of having to develop our own solutions – they are not even publishable: I’d suggest anyone who wants to have social computing features on her website to use buddypress instead, there’s no competition on that matter.
If you have any other question, just comment below here: I’ll be glad to answer 
Tags: architecture, emulator, website
