I am embarking on a project which is primarily for my own use, but I have some hopes of commercializing it later. The business plan would involve licensing it for use on commercial websites I don't control. I see three major challenges in integrating with an existing site (ignoring details about different container software):
1) Database usage Right now all of my data, including user authentication, is in the database. This is fine for when there is a single dataset, but I expect each user (group of users) to have a completely independent set of data. I'm evaluating using Torque for DB interaction, but I don't know if there is a good way to choose a separate datasource depending on the user. Another aspect is calling Torque to build the database when a user who has not used my feature comes along. That may or may not involve creating a new database for the user, since the site may already be set up with a database for each user; it is likely, however, to involve creating a new set of tables. Presumably I need a table naming scheme which will minimize the chances that there will be a conflict. 2) User authentication Basically, I expect that a user will be logged in to the site as a whole, and I should be able to just read their cookie and authenticate it. I am, however, unsure how such cookies are usually dealt with on the backend (e.g. is the cookie usually user and pass, or is it some unique identifier that matches in the database, or does the identifier match automatically in the server-side runtime the way a session cookie does?). 3) Page layout I actually expect it to be reasonably easy to handle layout customization with with Tiles. I'm not sure how well the various Struts tags deal with CSS (do all the HTML tags allow class attributes?). I wrote a prototype several months ago in straight JSP (with some custom tags), gave it up as unmaintainable, and recently finished reading Struts Kickstart. My purpose in posting this to the list is to get the benefit of the membership's collective experience. Is Torque a good choice? Is creating a separate database for each user unacceptable from the point of view of a website which provides services on a per-user basis? Is Tiles sufficient for customizing layout and such? Any suggestions, tales of woe, or design critiques are appreciated. Please do not CC me; I am subscribed to the list. --Greg --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
