A nonintrusive approach for implementing single database, multitenant services from web applications
Alexandre Michetti Manduca, Ethan V. Munson, Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Mariada Graça C. Pimentel · 2014
In the Software as a Service (SaaS) distribution model, the software belongs to the service provider and clients act as tenants who pay to use the software. However, sparse documentation and problem-specific solutions imply that building a scalable, secure and configurable Software as a Service is not an easy task. This paper describes a reusable approach for implementing Single Database, Multitenant Software as a Service from existing Web Applications by adding multitenancy as an aspect of the Software. The approach uses architectural components, design patterns and current main-stream programming language functionality without requiring extensive changes to the original Web application. We used our approach to develop both a real-world use case, built in Ruby on Rails, and a reference application, built in Java, which is freely available.