I'm quite new to Laravel and watche a bunch of screencasts here on Laracast, which quite impressed me. Now, I found out about Spark, which looks pretty nice. However I have some questions about it and I would like to get some responses from Laravel- and Spark-Experts.
So as you can image, I want to build a new SaaS app and all the things Spark provides were nice to have. So buying Spark would help me to kick off the project. But two questions are in my head I cannot answer myself so far.
I want to build a core version, which is usable out off the box using Laravel (and maybe Spark). In addition I want to be able to build modules, which can be added to the core and are separated composer projects. I already found Pingpong (http://sky.pingpong-labs.com/docs/2.1) but I don't know if Spark and pingpong can work together well. So this problem leads me to the second question.
So I want to open source my code. But when I use Spark I probably cannot open source everything, because Spark is not open source and Taylor Otwell (creator of Spark) would not be please to see that I published Spark with my source code. Can I add Spark as a module just for my SaaS but not include it for the open source version? Because firstly, I probably may not publish it, secondly, the open source version does not need e.g. a payment implementation.
Hi
I'm not quite sure what you want your saas app to do when you start it. This would help answer.
The second question I would say no you can not consider any spark app possible to separate. It's not a module it's like an extended framework. You have to code in to it. Taylor is releasing updates you can pull in but my understanding so far is everyone has had to code changes in to work with these. Laravel is the module in side spark not the otherway round.
So I think that would lead to not needing the first question answered unless you want to just sell the service and not your saas code as open source.