SaaS Application start from scratch
In terms of expansion of my knowledge, I would like to try to make an SaaS application. I dont really care of app funcionality, but I would like to learn about technology behind it. So my question is, would be someone so kind and show me where to start? some good reading, tutorials, articles or books? I am most interested in:
- every user, after registration, has its own playground at username.domain.com
- app should use some kind of master script which will generate content for all users
- what are pitfalls of such app?
- what technology backend is needed?
I am open to Ruby on Rails solution. Sorry for my bad english, hope I make it clear. Thanks
Answer
You want to build a multi-tenant solution.
Some things to consider:
Each one of your users should have an isolated database. This means you need to choose a database driver that can switch the database at run time. The id of database could be based on the user-part of the domain.
You can use Devise+cancan for registration. But you will need to redefine some Devise controllers so that they take in consideration the database.
You may consider reading Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails by Paul Dix. It has a lot of interesting ideas that you can use to build an efficient service oriented app, which undoubtedly is the kind architecture that you should strive to create.
I suggest that you use Heroku to host your application. MongoHQ would be very nice for the databases - and they have an api to make CRUD on databases programatically.
And finally, remember to fully test your application. Capybara plus Steak for integration testing, RSpec for models and controllers and Jasmine for Javascript.
Also, don't implement your own payment system. There are a lot of providers that you can use like http://recurly.com/.