Question

Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of applying the N-tier architecture to system development efforts. What are the various options for layers and what are examples of the functionality for each layer?

Answer 1

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As per the requirement submitted above , kindly find the below solution.

N-Tire Architecture :

• N-Tire Architecture refers to either 2-tire architecture ,3-tire architecture or 4-tire architecture etc, where n represents any digit.
• N-Tire Architecture or layered architecture in system development separates an application into layers such as
  • UI Layer (User Interface Layer) or Presentation Layer
  • BLL (Business Logic Layer)
  • DAL (Data Access Layer)
• UI Layer (User Interface Layer) or Presentation Layer :
  • This layer represents the user interface or the part that is only visible to the end user this means user interface screens through which user interacts with the system.
  • Presentation layer can be implemented by using HTML , CSS and Javascript in case of web pages and it might be windows desktop application.
• BLL (Business Logic Layer) :
  • This layer contains the actual logic for system implementation or business entities.
  • This layer is responsible to have a communication between other two layer.
  • This layer is implemented in any programming language of choice such as C#, JAVA , PHP or Python etc.
• DAL (Data Access Layer) :
  • ​​​​​​​This layer is responsible for database communication with the application.
  • Using data access layer data can be passed from application to database such as registration information
  • and vice versa of this that means data can be passed from database to application through business logic layer for checking login credentials.

Advantages of n-tire architecture : Below are the some of the advantages of layered architecture.

• Easy to Test:Due to separation of each layer testability of application can be improved this means each part of the application either user interface screen , business logic layer or data access layer can be unit tested.
• Reusability of application : Some part of the application can be reused as per requirement.
• Easy to scale :Each layer of application can be scaled on different machines.

Disadvantages of n-tire architecture :

• In case of disadvantages this application separation sometimes needs to put more efforts and complexity of application can be increased.

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