Saturday, March 26, 2016

SaaS Developer Guide - Sample Application - Cloud Learner

Using a sample application is going to spice up the SaaS Developer Guide blogposts. It is going to help in explaining deep technical concepts in an easy understandable way. A picture is worth thousand words. Similarly a sample app is worth ten thousand words. So this is the sample application that will be used by all SaaS Developer Guide blog posts.

Cloud Learner Business Architecture

Cloud Learner is a cloud based distant educational system. It allows lecturers to offer online courses. Students can sign up to classes. Each class has a forum and notification board, where online lecture times and other notifications are hosted. Cloud Learner is not going facilitate conducting online classes as it is a complete different application domain. The creator of Cloud Learner has made a deal with another SaaS provider that specializes in communication and unified communication solutions, namely UniCom. In short, UniCom offers online conferencing capabilities, that Cloud Learner lecturers are going to use to conduct online classes.

Cloud Learner User-story

Users can signup to Cloud Learner.
  • Users can sign up as a lecturer - Lecturers can create courses and advertise them in Cloud Learner. Lectures start the class and each class would get,
    • Notice board
    • Forum
    • Evaluation tests
    • Online conferencing facility for conducting classes
  • Users can sign up as students - Students can view the offered courses and subscribe to them after paying subscription fees. Students has access to forum and notification board once subscribed.

Cloud Learner Subscription Levels

Students can register and browse Cloud Learner free of charge. However lecturers have to pay subscriptions. There are three subscription categories available.

Demo
  • One repetition of one course
  • 25 student subscriptions
Silver
  • One course
  • 25 student subscriptions
Gold
  • One course
  • Unlimited number of student subscriptions
Platinum
  • Four courses
  • Unlimited number of student subscriptions

Each class can have  up-to maximum of 8 online conferences, and the the charges are included in the subscription.


High-level architecture for Cloud Learner

Cloud learner has several modules.





Class CRUD Service - Create, read, update and delete all class related functionalities such as forum, test and notices

Course CRUD Service - Create, read, update and delete all courses

Subscription Management Service - Manages subscription of students to services

User registration and Management Service - Handles all user related matters

Conferences are created for each online lecture in external communication provider upon request of the lecturer.





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