saas

SaaS database design - Multiple Databases? Split?

I've seen SaaS applications hosted in many different ways. Is it a good idea to split features and modules across multiple databases? For example, putting things like the User table on one DB and feature/app specific tables on another DB and perhaps other commonly shared tables in another DB? ...

Multi tenant architecture and NHibernate

Could anyone explain me finally what is the best strategy to implement transparent and fluent support of multi-tenant functionality in NHibernate powered domain model? Im looking for the way, how to keep the domain logic as isolated as possible from the multi-tenant stuff like filtering by TenantID etc ...

Best Way to Manage Configuration Data

I'm working on a SaaS application where each customer will have different configurations depending on the edition they have purchased, additional features they have purchased, etc. For example, a customer might have a limit of 3 custom reports. Obviously I want to store this configuration in the database, but I am unsure of the best app...

Version control "in the clouds"

I'm a developer who works on both individual and group projects using Microsoft Visual Studio. I could setup one of several different source control packages, such as VSS, SourceGear Vault or SVN on a server of my own and access them remotely; however, I don't want to deal with the hassle of setting it up, configuring it, etc. Does any...

Do in-line ads indicate a SaaS product's monetization strategy is flawed?

Before I continue with my question, I think there's a perfect real-world analogy to the creation of a new and shiny web application. (and yes, I chose the incendiary title to simply to draw you here ... we tolerate them at Google and I have no intention of quitting SO). When Wal-mart determines that a market will support a store, they ...

How would you approach, in .NET, allowing the tenants of a multi-tenant SaaS app to arbitrarily add properties to the entities of the model?

So, we're building a multi-tenant system to run as a service. We're starting from the ground up. We're following DDD; the domain has (at the moment) ~20 entities in it, and later there will be more. It is to be hosted by us, geographically redundant (n+1 of everything except SQL queries ;-) ), and of flexible design (well, that last ...

SAAS per seat authentication

Hi Our company makes the web based application which is priced per workstation. That means that user/pass credentials should only be used from one particular machine. Currently what is happening that several users are sharing credentials and we do not have any way to prevent this if they are not doing it concurrently. The nature o...

What is the best way to measure and cap bandwidth usage in a LAMP SaaS Web application?

The company I work for is thinking of developing a LAMP SaaS Web application that would be plan based. We want to monitor usage because it involves external references, and would draw bandwidth through the placement of an iframe or JavaScript snippet on a third-party site. My first thought was relying only on a page impression algorithm,...

Hosted subversion recommendations or suggestions

I'm investigating using hosted subversion for a new project at work and was wondering if anyone had any experiences they would share. I've personally used Beanstalk for small projects at home, but not with mulitple users or a large repository. What/who have you used? For what size/type of project? What was your experience? (Uptime, p...

Efficient Filtering / Searching

We have a hosted application that manages pages of content. Each page can have a number of customized fields, and some standard fields (timestamp, user name, user email, etc). With potentially hundreds of different sites using the system -- what is an efficient way to handle filtering/searching? Picture a grid view that you want to narr...

Is your employer comfortable with a hosted bug tracking solution, or it has to be inhouse?

Hi, Was your employer comfortable with a hosted bug tracking solution, or it just had to be in house for security/paranoia reasons? I can see small teams of remote developers benefiting from it, but most bosses (i would think) would be to paranoid to let someone else know of their internals. ...

Account based lookup in ASP.NET

I'm looking at using ASP.NET for a new SaaS service, but for the love of me I can't seem to figure out how to do account lookups based on subdomains like most SaaS applications (e.g. 37Signals) do. For example, if I offer yourname.mysite.com, then how would I use ASP.NET (MVC specifically) to extract the subdomain so I can load the righ...

Which Business Model: SaaS (Software as a Service) or Desktop ?

I've got a product something like a SEO analyser in a more enterprise level. Target is mostly medium to big sized companies. Which business model is better? SaaS (Software as a Service) or classical desktop application. SaaS comes with some great advantages such as : Easier to update the backend system (quick fixes, UI changes, inst...

SaaS-company structure

What is the most typical structure of business where you want to develop several web services? Should one establish a company for each of them or keep under one? I would like to hear your experiences maintaining such situation, keeping in mind the global focus. ...

Are there any good online IDEs?

Bounty Added: I am looking for an online "IDE" that supports Objective-C. Does anybody know of any good online IDEs that allow collaboration, like google docs and spreadsheets do? I'm not expecting a full version of Visual Studio but perhaps a cut down editor capable of HTML, javascript and CSS files, preferably with the ability to...

Multi-tenancy with SQL/WCF/Silverlight

We're building a Silverlight application which will be offered as SaaS. The end product is a Silverlight client that connects to a WCF service. As the number of clients is potentially large, updating needs to be easy, preferably so that all instances can be updated in one go. Not having implemented multi tenancy before, I'm looking for ...

Rebranding a GPL'd app as SaaS

Just a quick question since I'm a little iffy on exactly how the GPL works. Say I am developing a hosted software-as-a-service application, and I've found a free GPL app that does 90% of what I was going to write myself. Can I: A) Take the code from the app, rebrand it by changing the name and/or logo and, without modifying a single l...

Off-the-shelf Web-based Service Management Software

Does anyone know of any software designed to make it easy to create an in-the-cloud application manager? I figure I want something that I point at a database, define field names, validation and ACLs, then put those fields on widgets and the widgets on tabs and the tabs on pages and it will all just work. Surely there's something out th...

How can multiple webapps in the same tomcat instance share database connection pool?

Having in mind that each webapp has its own separate database (but all databases are in the same database server). The scenario is that I have a multi-tenant saas application - I deploy the same application for each customer. Each customer works on a database that is called db_cid, where cid is the customer id, i.e. a a unique customer ...

What are the best practices in building multi-tenancy applications?

What are the best practices in building applications that support multiple tenants such as Software as a Service? Links to white papers that expand on this topic are greatly appreciated. ...