What in the world is going on in the marketplace? Technology is moving so fast that it is sometimes a little difficult to tell what is happening.
Lets take a short trip back to the past.
It wasnt too long ago that applications were designed, developed, and deployed on a single machine. For those of you that can remember the early days of the personal computer era, things like dbase, FoxBASE, and the like might ring a bell. Everything ran on the same machine — the user interface, the business rules, and the database services.
Then along came local area networks, which ushered in the era of clientserver applications. Now the user interface and the business rules sat on the PC and sent requests to a client-server DBMS such as Oracle or SQL Server, while on the server side, records were processed and results were returned to the client.
As LANs matured and their reliability improved, application development went through yet another evolution, namely, the advent of 3-tier architecture. This transformation resulted in the user interface, business rules, and data services each becoming its own independent logical element in the application...