Microsoft COM+ development Framework

If you are developing ASP pages without an N-Tier architecture, you may find trouble ahead. As your Internet Application grows, it will become more and more difficult to maintain changes and enhancements. Remember, you don't need to store data the way you look at it, and you don't need to look at data the way you store it. Here is a brief overview of developing within an N-Tier architecture.

The following paradigm outlines how a typical n-tier (or multi-tier) architecture is designed. By architecting your applications so that they are partitioned into multiple tiers you will decouple the user interface from the data storage. Each tier specializes in different functions such as data storage, data access, business rules validation, and data presentation.  All logical tiers may be located on one machine or deployed across several machines.

When developing Microsoft solutions, Artech uses a code generation tool called Advance. The Advance tool supports Artech's Rapid Application Development methodologies and Framework based development. The tool is publicly available from Xages.com

All the code generated by Advance follows the n-tier paradigm for enterprise level solutions. 

The business objects created by Advance do not contain any company-specific business rules.  These objects are meant to be used as a starting point in which you can add your own business rules.  Objects created by Advance can be synchronized with your current tables without losing any changes made to the existing source code.  This synchronization takes place when Advance generates new source code over existing objects created with Advance.

The presentation tier follows specific application designs, therefore, Advance does not create any front-ends or user interfaces.  It is up to you or your company to decide which type of front-end to use, i.e. Visual Basic, ASP, C#, etc.

Since N-tier applications are usually deployed across a network or the Internet, security and performance become an issue.  The stored procedures, business and data access objects generated by Advance are optimized for speed and take advantage of the security models implemented by SQL Server, COM+, and Windows NT/2000.  In addition, all the objects created by Advance have built in load balancing and fail over support.

If you would like to know more about implementing multi-tier technologies, and how they may help you, contact us at sales@artechgroup.com