Marc, that definitely sounds close to what I am trying to achieve. In case you do indeed go about making those modifications available, I would certainly volunteer to review and provide feedback.
Thanks, Henning Am Donnerstag, den 02.07.2009, 09:31 -0400 schrieb Marc Morin: > We have made multi-tenant modifications to ofbiz to run on a single VM. We > have not contributed this back to the community yet, but plan on it. > > In our implementation, each tenant is running the same application suite, > and they differ only in the database configurations via the entityengine.xml. > We've essentially, made "templates" for the entity engine entries that allow > each tenant to have their own delegator. This means, depending upon how you > configure the entityengine.xml file, you can have each tenant have a private > copy of the entire schema, or share components via the use of entity groups. > > There are some limitations in our design choices, that were appropriate for > our use (for now): > > 1- We provide each tenant with a separate hostname, and then maintain a > hostname to delegator name mapping in a "main" database instance. This is > the deployment meta data. This is cumbersome and obviously has some extra > dependancy on proper DNS configuration. This can be changed to a modified > "login" page of some sort. > 2- Haven't completed the job manager to have a singleton across tenants. > Right now, the job manager is instantiated for each delegator, so, if you > have 1000 tenants, you'd have a 1000 threats.. not scalable. Plan on fixing > that. > 3- Each tenant must share the same configuration files, means each tenant > must be running same "application" or solution. > 4- Currently each UserLogin entity is a private entity per tenant. Makes for > improved isolation, but harder to manage all the login credentials to the > system. We have an LDAP infrastructure and have debated using that for > credential management. > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Henning" <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2009 7:28:21 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern > Subject: Using OfBiz modular, partially, and in many instances > > Hi Experts, > > I would like to embed OfBiz with a module environment (not OSGi - but > sufficiently similar to think OSGi if that helps) and for multiple > tenants on one VM. The latter is the the stronger requirement for me. > But as far as modularization is concerned, Ofbiz seems to be in good > shape: The individual logical projects (under framework and > applications) that are all packaged up as one Eclipse project can be > broken up into smaller projects that have a beautiful and meaningful > dependency chain and still compile (at least). Executing them is > probably another story. > > Now in terms of multi-tenant usage, I would love to be able to run > different "instances" of OfBiz within the same server. So every tenant > would get its own OfBiz configuration (including its own data source > configuration). OfBiz features would actually be something additional, > integrated with another application and OfBiz would not be the leading > infastructure. > > I remember having seen some similar discussions on the mailing list > some time ago - they all seemed to go nowhere. To me it seems that using > OfBiz as the fundamental functional underpinning and toolbox for > anything eCommerce is a very natural path to follow, but it should not > have unbreakable ties to exactly one underlying infrastructure. I > understand that OfBiz has spent some effort into creating its own module > system (kind of) - that's perfectly fine and seeing OfBiz run > out-of-the-box after 5min. is perfect. However, other places, other > infrastructures. > > Anyway, if anybody has a pointer to something that is similar to what > I described above or some success story, it would be great, if you could > let me know. Of course, if there is good reasons why this cannot work > w/o touching OfBiz in an unknown but huge number of places that would > also be valuable information. > > If I end up getting it done myself and if there is interest, I will be > happy to share my experience. > > Thanks, > Henning
