# Using Discourse in a web app
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-discourse-in-a-web-app/57455
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [February 15, 2017, 10:49pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-discourse-in-a-web-app/57455 "2017-02-15T22:49:29Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@jack2](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jack2)
#### Post date: [February 15, 2017, 10:49pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-discourse-in-a-web-app/57455/1 "2017-02-15T22:49:29Z")
I am a web developer, new to Discourse. I would like to create a web app where users could discuss a document.
The UI would look like this:
- a main area showing the document,
- other areas/windows/tabs where users could create topics to discuss parts of the document.
Does it sound feasible with Discourse? If it does, how could this be done?
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### Author:  [@blake](https://meta.discourse.org/u/blake)
#### Post date: [February 15, 2017, 11:32pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-discourse-in-a-web-app/57455/2 "2017-02-15T23:32:43Z")
You could probably just create a topic where the first post is a link or an uploaded document.
I would recommend setting up a discourse on a digital ocean droplet and trying out your use case.
[discourse/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md)
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### Author:  [@joebuhlig](https://meta.discourse.org/u/joebuhlig)
#### Post date: [February 16, 2017, 2:02am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-discourse-in-a-web-app/57455/3 "2017-02-16T02:02:40Z")
Another option would be to look into embedding a topic on your document page. It would require the user to click into the comments to leave a reply but that’s no different than any other commenting structure.
> [@Embed Discourse comments on another website via Javascript](https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments-via-javascript/31963):
>
> Discourse has the ability to embed the comments from a topic in a remote site using a Javascript API that creates an IFRAME. For an example of this in action, check out [Coding Horror’s blog](http://blog.codinghorror.com/welcome-to-the-internet-of-compromised-things/#discourse-comments). The blog is run via [Ghost](https://ghost.org/) but the comments are embedded from his [Discourse forum](http://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/welcome-to-the-internet-of-compromised-things/3550). One important thing to note with this setup is that users have to navigate to your forum to post replies. This is intentional, as we feel that the posting interface on a Discourse forum is currently much richer than what we …
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### Author:  [@jack2](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jack2)
#### Post date: [February 16, 2017, 3:19pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-discourse-in-a-web-app/57455/4 "2017-02-16T15:19:54Z")
@blake, @joebuhlig, thanks a lot.
I have created [a prototype](http://www.utopiaedit.com/) to showcase the idea. I am in the process of simplifying the UX, re-engineering the whole stuff and planning for version 1.
I would like to pursue the `iframe` idea further :
Has anyone embedded a **topic list** instead of a **comment list**? What if I use categories as unique identifiers for document sub-parts? I could then use the appropriate url (for example : `https://mydiscourse.com/c/document-sub-part-id`) to show only the relevant topics. But will it then be easy to hide all the unnecessary banners and buttons to show only a clean topic list ?