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My boss quite regularly has to demo our web application to clients in a situation with no WiFi available and sketchy 3G access - quite often, the 3G lets him down.

I have considered setting a copy of our server up in a virtual machine on his laptop so he could demo it offline, but I fear this will just introduce more headaches when he forgets how to boot the VM up.

What I'd ideally like is a way to mirror the webapp, recording you logging into a web app, saving copies of all the pages and tying the links and buttons you click up to offline copies of the saved pages. In other words, you could run through the demonstration you're going to give and have it cache the pages. When you then click the same buttons and links in offline mode it will present the relevant offline pages.

How could I implement something like this?

nc4pk
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littlecharva
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2 Answers2

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You could also install a WAMP package on his laptop. Then his laptop just runs a local server. Than he can even add customer specific demo data.

pritaeas
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  • +1 WAMP is ace, I use it here to configure local intranet pages before using them in our production enviroment :) – HaydnWVN Nov 17 '11 at 17:04
  • That's assuming our webapp runs on WAMP, which it doesn't. I'd have to install IIS, SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET MVC and quite a few other things. – littlecharva Nov 17 '11 at 17:08
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    @littlecharva: Download Microsoft's Web Platform Installer. This is a good installer that will download and install relevant software on a single test machine for web app development. http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx. I would add this as an answer but it is essentially a subset of WAMP. Keep in mind WAMP no longer applies just to MySQL, Apache, Microsoft, and PHP. But it is essentially packaging all three tiers into a locally installed package. – surfasb Nov 17 '11 at 17:47
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Does such a thing exist?

If it does, it is guaranteed to embarrass your boss in front of very important customers when he frantically clicks on a non-functioning button because he has forgotten the exact script or been thrown off by a question.

Can anyone recommend any alternative solutions to this problem?

  • Slideshow.

  • One of those apps that "films" whats happening on the screen and can play it back with the ability to pause.

  • Bite the bullet, install a local copy of the app.

RedGrittyBrick
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