Rails - Jul 2005 - Rails App Design/Deployment Best Practices?

I''m new to web-app development (coming from client/sever app
development for
the past 10 years) and was wondering if there''s a good place to learn 
tips/tricks for Rails design/deployment. Specifically, I''m having
difficulty
figuring out how to convert a private web-app intended for personal use into 
one supporting hundreds or thousands of users. The Rails part is easy with 
login generator, but I''m having trouble with the database part. 

I''ve created a table of users (user names, user ids, and hashed
passwords),
but is it acceptable to go back into my other data tables and add a foreign 
key tied to the user id? Since all of the users will be sharing the same 
database I will need to always ensure that SQL calls are scoped to user id 
(again Rails appears to make this easy). Now what happens if I have 
businesses with several users which want to share the data as a group ... I 
need some sort of group id for the data instead of a user id.

Are there any good examples of this? Are there good resources on DB design 
that cover this sort of stuff? I''m curious how an app like Basecamp or 
Backpack uses the database -- do all customers share the same database 
tables or are they separated into different database instances (which seems 
like it would require an instance of the Rails app server per DB)? I would 
assume the former as the latter seems like too much unnecessary overhead.

Many thanks in advance,
Sean


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I''m no DB guru, but the Rails book has a good chapter on deployment 
that covers the main issues AFAIK. You will def want to look at page 
caching. Also check out the deploy script (google "rails deploy" and
it
should come up in the first few maches).

Ben

On Jul 29, 2005, at 10:28 AM, Sean Mountcastle wrote:
>
>  I''m new to web-app development (coming from client/sever app 
> development for the past 10 years) and was wondering if there''s a
good
> place to learn tips/tricks for Rails design/deployment. Specifically, 
> I''m having difficulty figuring out how to convert a private
web-app
> intended for personal use into one supporting hundreds or thousands of 
> users.  The Rails part is easy with login generator, but I''m
having
> trouble with the database part.
>
>  I''ve created a table of users (user names, user ids, and hashed 
> passwords), but is it acceptable to go back into my other data tables 
> and add a foreign key tied to the user id? Since all of the users will 
> be sharing the same database I will need to always ensure that SQL 
> calls are scoped to user id (again Rails appears to make this easy). 
> Now what happens if I have businesses with several users which want to 
> share the data as a group ... I need some sort of group id for the 
> data instead of a user id.
>
>  Are there any good examples of this?  Are there good resources on DB 
> design that cover this sort of stuff? I''m curious how an app like 
> Basecamp or Backpack uses the database -- do all customers share the 
> same database tables or are they separated into different database 
> instances (which seems like it would require an instance of the Rails 
> app server per DB)? I would assume the former as the latter seems like 
> too much unnecessary overhead.
>
>  Many thanks in advance,
>  Sean
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
>
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Ben Jackson
Diretor de Desenvolvimento

+55 (21) 9997-0593
ben-p14LI7ZcAE/pVLaUnt/cCQC/G2K4zDHf@public.gmane.org
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