A Layered Distributed Application: An Experience Report

Web applications depend on many different infrastructure components such as Web Servers, Firewalls, or Application Servers. Furthermore these applications are accessed from different browser platforms on different hardware. Changing the infrastructure components affects the Web application architecture itself. Maintainable Web applications require a well-established practice to divide an application architecture into different layers (or tiers). This experience report presents an architecture for a Web application, that can be distributed over the Internet, based on SOAP for communication between client and server part. Advantages and shortcomings of the presented architecture are briefly described as well.