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Logical Three-Tier Model

When you build components in a Windows distributed system, you will define the components based on the services they perform. For example, the Web page running in the Web browser will perform services for the user, such as allowing the user to enter information, select information, or navigate to another Web page. Components placed on the Web server will receive requests from the Web browser to perform services such as accessing a particular Web page, searching the catalog for all occurrences of a particular word, and so on. The services that a system can perform are divided into three categories: user services, business services, and data services. Thus, you can form three tiers: the user services tier, the business services tier, and the data services tier. Each of these tiers consists of one or more components.

User Services Components

The user services components are responsible for passing information to and from the user. Specifically, they gather information from the user and then send the user information to the business services components for processing. After the information is processed, the user services components receive the processed results from the business services components and present them to the user. Typically, the user is a person and the user services components consist of user interface components such as Web pages in a browser, an .EXE application containing forms, and the like. A user could also be another system-in which case, there's no visible interface. An example of this scenario would be an application that verifies credit card information.

To design user services components, you must interview the potential users of the system. Based on these interviews, you can create a detailed description of the steps required to complete each of the tasks that the system will be asked to perform. These descriptions can then be turned into Unified Modeling Language (UML) use cases. UML is a set of models used to design object-oriented systems, although it can be used to design virtually any system. A use case is a text description of how a user will perform a task; each use case has a specific format such as a flowchart, a flow diagram, or a step-by-step outline in a table format. These use cases will help you organize the steps required to complete your tasks, will help you define the components your system will need to perform these tasks, and can be used as the basis of the design for your entire distributed system.

For the most part, user services components are designed to meet a specific need and are not reusable. For example, the user components specifically created for entering employee information are not likely reusable in an application that's used for obtaining order information from customers.

Besides communicating with the user, most applications must process data. For these applications, you will also need to define a set of business rules that govern how data is handled. Examples of business rules could be the requirement that every customer have a name, a customer ID, and a billing address. Business rules are similar to use cases, except that they are text descriptions of the requirements to be met to ensure a business is run correctly. In a two-tier architecture model, some or all of the business rules regarding data processing are placed in the user services components. In a three-tier architecture model, the business rules are moved from the user services components to the business services components.