3.2. The Importance of the Middle Tiers

Enterprise-scale solutions are inherently large, complex, and distributed. To be effective they must be deployed to architectures that support these needs. Many choices face the designer in defining the architecture of distributed systems.

To understand these choices it is necessary to amplify the discussions of previous chapters, and explore two topics in further detail. First, it requires a deeper understanding of the migration of current design practices from developing systems based on client/server architectures to systems based on n-tier architectures. This in turn leads to the second topic—a broader examination of typical architectural styles for n-tier distributed systems.

From Client-Server to ...

Get Large-Scale, Component-Based Development now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.