SaaS Application start from scratch

Question

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 1

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/.