Research On Software Customization Technology For SaaS Applications

In recent years, with the rapid development of internet technology and the gradual maturity of cloud computing, a new software paradigm is attracting more and more attention of industry and academia, this is SaaS (Software as a Service). Its appearance, with its unparalleled advantages of low-cost, use on demand and easy to implement and management, has brought about significant influence on the informationization of small-medium enterprises.Compared with traditional software, the biggest feature of SaaS applications is multi-tenant architecture, which means a large number of tenants share the same running instance. Because of this, it has inevitably brought new challenges to the development techniques and methods of SaaS applications. Among them, the online customization is one of the key challenges. The customization techniques and methods for traditional software have been unable to meet the needs of SaaS applications.The purpose of this paper is to research the online customization technology of data and business logic for SaaS applications, in order to support the flexible configuration of SaaS applications, to meet the individual needs of different tenants and to improve the user experience.This paper firstly described the background of SaaS, analyzed the current research and application at home and abroad, pointed out the key challenges that SaaS is facing, focusing on the customization of SaaS.Secondly, this paper studied separately from the two important aspects of customization--data and business logic. For the data customization, this paper conducted experiments on some custom data customization models, such as pre-assigned fields, name-value pairs, pivot table and XML field, then analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of each model under the influence of two important factors with SaaS, drew some general trade-off conclusions. These conclusions can be used to guide the choice of data model for SaaS applications. For the business logic customization, this paper fully considered the usability of the approach, and proposed the design method for business rule template based on domain engineering. On this basis, this paper proposed a flexible business logic customization framework. Through the framework, tenants can customize business logic online easily.Finally, combining the actual business needs of the chemical sales company named H and its subsidiaries, adopting the methods and framework presented in this paper, we developed an actual SaaS application--enterprise performance appraisal system, in order to illustrate and validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the results of this research. Trial run results of tenants show that the SaaS application adopting the methods and framework proposed in the paper has a good user experience, can meet the vast majority of tenants for the data and business logic customization needs.