Vuzit Document Viewer Blog

Reverse Engineering the 100% AJAX Vuzit Document Viewer

April 15, 2009 – 11:00 am by Chris Cera    Printable Version

Most people think about documents as individual files, and this is where our viewpoint contrasts with the norm.  We believe that working with files should be merely an option, and a less desirable one for certain applications.

At Vuzit we try to eat our own dog food with every subsystem we build into the Vuzit stack.  As I’ll explain here, we have built our viewer and website using all the same components that we offer to our customers.

Viewer Architecture

The core of the Vuzit stack is our Web Services which provide access to each document’s attributes and content.  Then our 100% AJAX Viewer queries the attributes and pages so that it can render the document (using the Show and Static Image API methods respectively) .  This middle layer, the Vuzit Viewer, could be enhanced or replaced with any document display technology.  The outer layer of the Stack is the Web Site that builds the Vuzit Viewer into its web pages.

The Vuzit Viewer uses only our published Web Services API

I’m happy to announce that with the Vuzit JavaScript 2.6 release our Viewer is exclusively using only our published Web Service APIs to display documents.  This means that anyone could build a Viewer, and perhaps, an even better viewer than Vuzit using our own back-end.  Here is a basic summary of the RESTful Web Service queries that take place:

Document Attributes:  http://vuzit.com/documents/oc.json?key=Vuzit
Page 1: http://vuzit.com/documents/oc/pages/0.jpg?z=2&key=Vuzit
Page 2: http://vuzit.com/documents/oc/pages/1.jpg?z=2&key=Vuzit
…

This is some early work on the GET /Resty approach mentioned by Brian McCallister from Ning at ETE 2009.  Here is an excellent slide displayed using our Static Image API):

The Vuzit website uses only our published JavaScript API

It’s also worth noting that the http://vuzit.com website uses the same Javascript API that we provide to everyone else.  We use HTML, CSS, and our JavaScript API to layout every page, specify the toolbar buttons, and finally use our secure authentication protocol to load private and sensitive documents.  We don’t use any special code on our site, but we might forget to document a feature from time to time.

Challenge: Build Vuzit into your product

We have designed our Premium+ product to be integrated within other products and services.  It’s simple, scalable, customizable, and secure.  Contact us for more details.