SaaS development using .Net

Question

I do not know how to explain this in technical terms. So let me begin with an example:

Story

I have an online e-commerce site www.ABCStore.com . I built this using MVC 4 (Razor) in Dot Net. My friend has a travel agency for which his online site is www.DEFAgency.com . He got it built in Java.

Both our websites were up and running. One fine day I got a call from a company FicticiousServiceProvider and they asked me if I would be interested in getting customer feedback as a functionality on my website without having to write any code myself. What they offered was, I would have to include just a single line of code in the footer of my Masterpage(or layout page) and then the customers who log on to the site would see a small icon on the pages and would be able to provide their feedback.

The feedback will not be available directly to me. The FicticiousServiceProvider guys will analyze the data and provide them to me on a regular basis or on a need basis.

There were other services too which they offered.

I was really happy to have a functionality like that, specially without having to write any code. I tried it and it worked fine in my .Net website. My friend(with a java website) also added a single line to his code and it worked for him too.

My questions here are:

1. What is this process called ?

2. If I were FicticiousServiceProvider, how would I have developed this using .Net ? I mean, how to develop a functionality so that a consumer can consume the service using a single line provided by the service provider. Data transfer from my site in the form of feedback to the FicticiousServiceProvider is also happening, without me being able to see anything.

3. How was it possible for FicticiousServiceProvider to provide the functionality to a .Net app and a java app without any change in the line provided by them?

I have given the description from a consumers perspective. Please suggest from a developer's perspective. Many Thanks.

Answer 1

These things, like Google Analytics tracking code, are usually some kind of javascript injecton. It will use javascript to 'inject' a bit of code that sends a request to their servers (what their server side is coded in is irrelevant really). They then handle the request that includes the information they've gathered in javascript on the client side and store it, then use server side software to analyse that data to give out reports, etc..

So to try and answer your question separately.

1. I'd call the process javascript injection.
2. You would have to find the best way to send a request to your servers and handle that request. Could be done with ASP.Net MVC quite easily but any server side technology/code that can handle requests and send data to a store.
3. They use javascript which is separate to any server side code and works across browsers on the client side.