Are there any negative reasons to use an N-Tier solution?

Question

I'm pretty new to my company (2 weeks) and we're starting a new platform for our system using .NET 3.5 Team Foundation from DotNetNuke. Our "architect" is suggesting we use one class project. Of course, I chime back with a "3-tier" architecture (Business, Data, Web class projects).

Is there any disadvantages to using this architecture? Pro's would be separation of code from data, keeping class objects away from your code, etc.

Answer 1

I guess a fairly big downside is that the extra volume of code that you have to write, manage and maintain for a small project may just be overkill.

It's all down to what's appropriate for the size of the project, the expected life of the final project and the budget! Sometimes, whilst doing things 'properly' is appealing, doing something a little more 'lightweight' can be the right commercial decision!

Answer 2

it tends to take an inexperienced team longer to build 3-tier.It's more code, so more bugs. I'm just playing the devil's advocate though.

Answer 3

I would be pushing hard for the N tiered approach even if it's a small project. If you use an ORM tool like codesmith + nettiers you will be able to quickly setup the projects and be developing code that solves your business problems quickly.

It kills me when you start a new project and you spend days sitting around spinning wheels talking about how the "architecture" should be architected. You want to be spending time solving the business problem, not solving problems that other people have solved for you. Using an ORM (it doesn't really matter which one, just pick one and stick to it) to help you get initial traction will help keep you focussed on the goals of the project and not distract you trying to solve "architecture" issues.

If, at the end of the day, the architect wants to go the one project approach, there is no reason you can't create an app_code folder with a BLL and DAL folder to seperate the code for now which will help you move to an N-Tiered solution later.

Answer 4

Because you want the capability of being able to distribute the layers onto different physical tiers (I always use "tier" for physical, and "layer" for logical), you should think twice before just putting everything into one class because you've got major refactorings to do if or when you do need to start distributing.

Answer 5

As with anything abstraction creates complexity, and so the complexity of doing N-tiered should be properly justified, e.g., does N-tiered actually benefit the system? There will be small systems that will work best with N-tiered, although a lot of them will not.

Also, even if your system is small at the moment, you might want to add more features to it later -- not going N-tiered might consitute a sort of technical debt on your part, so you have to be careful.

Answer 6

The only disadvantage is complexity but really how hard is it to add some domain objects and bind to a list of them as opposed to using a dataset. You don't even have to create three seperate projects, you can just create 3 seperate folders within the web app and give each one a namespace like, YourCompany.YourApp.Domain, YourCompany.YourApp.Data, etc.

The big advantage is having a more flexible solution. If you start writing your app as a data centric application, strongly coupling your web forms pages to datasets, you are going to end up doing a lot more work later migrating to a more domain centeric model as your business logic grows in complexity.

Maybe in the short term you focus on a simple solution by creating very simple domain objects and populating them from datasets, then you can add business logic to them as needed and build out a more sophisticated ORM as needed, or use nhibernate.