SoftwareEngineeringBestPracticesThreeTierArchitecture

http://best-practice-software-engineering.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/architecture.html

The above illustration shows our sample application. It is divided into the classical three tiers: Presentation Layer, which is the interface to the user, business layer, which handles the data objects and modifies them and Data Layer, which consists of a database that loads and stores data. In our example, the business layer is further divided into: (1) The service layer, which provides services to the presentation layer, controls the flow of the application and modifies data objects; and (2) the data access layer which deals with the communication to the database.

The illustration also shows that this sample comes in 3 variations:

• Basic: In the basic example, the user access the application with a Swing client. The service layer is built upon the popular Spring Framework. JDBC Templates (also a Spring Feature) are used to access the database.
• Medium: In the second sample application, the user accesses the application through a web frontend that builds on the Java Server Faces technology. The persistence layer uses the popular O/R mapping tool Hibernate.

All samples use the core module, which contains the interfaces and the data objects.