Endangered Middle-Tier, Revisited

Since this blog is now being syndicated on Architecture Center, I thought I should repost links to a recent pair of entries I wrote entitled “Is the Middle-Tier Endangered?” and “The Endangered Middle-Tier, Part 2“. The basic premise of the posts is that as computer hardware gets faster and service-orientation aims to carve our course-grained applications into finer-grained services, the value of running the business logic on a separate tier diminishes greatly. Add an improved programming model to the database (such as the CLR’s addition to SQL 2005) and I feel that, eventually, it will make more sense to run the services in-process with the database instead of on a separate tier. We’re not there yet – in addition to continued hardware improvements, we need a major improvement to the overall management infrastructure – but I think it will happen. The question is, do you think it will happen?

Comments:

Absolutely it will happen. It just makes so much sense to move the application server logic into the database, closer to the data. I also think with the rising popularity of smart clients, more business logic will be moved down to the client tier.
nice comment