Business Tier Architecture - Webservices/Remoting?

[Tim Smith]

Hi,

With our architecture we are looking at the following client
applications:
- 20-40 GUI desktop power users
- 40-100 ASP.NET light users
- 5-10 heavy server side integration apps

We would like to move all business logic into a single tier/layer.
This tier would either run on the same machine as the ASP.NET or
server apps, or another machine in the same cluster.

WebServices look appealing with their self documentation and ease of
use. We can even have testers test those components directly!

However with typed datasets being returned by most of the common
operations I am concerned that performance will become a problem.
Should I be turning to alternative methods - such as remoting (sp?)
which can use TCP binary transfers better suited for heavy data
processing?

If we do remain with webservices I assume we can add additional
machines to offload the server side processing? Is there an existing
MS directory technology suitable to aid in load balancing the web
services?

thanks!

 

[Eric Marvets]

Hmm...Its a tradeoff for a performance hit and ease of use vs. tougher
implementation and performance increase.

If you were to build the business functionality with a Service Oriented
Architecture in mind (keeping everything statelesss, etc.), you could have
your asp.net app use the business objects directly and put a webservice
wrapper around it for the 20-40 fat clients. I don't exactly know how you
were inteding to have the server side apps, but you could possibly use the
dll's locally.

With only 20-40 fat clients using the webservice, I wouldn't even worry
about using XML vs. binary as your transport.


--
Eric Marvets
Principal Consultant

the bang project

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[Joe Fallon]

Rocky Lhotka's CSLA framework for .Net may interest you. (His C# version is
coming out any day now.)
The same Business Objects (BOs) can be used in WinForms, Web Forms and Web
Services.

http://www.lhotka.net/ArticleIndex.aspx?area=CSLA .NET