Design And Implementation Of An Exports Management System With N-Tier Architecture

The idea of this project was perceived after a case study of an Exports Company in Kampala, Uganda. The company used the two-tier architecture for its sales management. However, competitive pressures have made it absolutely necessary to connect islands of information, resources and people together into a cohesive whole. With the Internet invent, Electronic Commerce, commonly known as e-commerce has continued to be a driving force behind future business growth worldwide. The global marketplace has become a business battleground as companies reach into all corners of the world to attract new customers. The rapid increase in the velocity of business change has put business managers under intense pressure to develop a flexible, secure, scalable, and highly available infrastructure. Many business companies today use the two-tier client/server architecture to improve multi-user updating through a graphical user interface (GUI) front end to a shared database. However, the two-tier architecture shows striking weaknesses in handling large applications as those involved in e-commerce. Maintaining a connection between many client workstations and the central database server can result in high network traffic and poor performance. A small change in the business rules means the client application must be rebuilt and redistributed making it inflexible. This means a company using the two-tier architecture can not safely venture in e-commerce.The Multi-tier (N-Tier) architecture is proposed as a better option in handling large applications. An N-tier application has three or more layers (tiers). This architecture implements an additional layer between the users and the database. The goal is to extract the business logic from the user and data tiers, placing it in a middle tier where it is easier to manage. This type of central application service can manage network traffic and database server loads more efficiently since the application logic is no longer tied directly to the database structures or a particular database management system. Object reuse in other applications is also possible since the code is isolated. This also provides better system management and therefore higher security levels. This results in a flexible, scalable, secure and highly available architecture.In this project, an Exports Management System (EMS) is designed and implemented with the N-tier architecture for the studied exports company. It has three tiers: The presentation tier which constitutes the user interface (client application and web application); the middle-tier which implements the business rules and transactions and the Data Services tier which deals with the database operations; information storage and manipulation. With the N-tier architecture, network traffic and database server loads are managed more efficiently, object reuse is possible, and the application provides better system management and therefore higher security levels. This results in a flexible, scalable, secure and highly available architecture. The N-tier architecture provides a great step forward in developing a safe e-commerce infrastructure. Business managers can therefore freely venture into the new global market, which the Internet offers through e-commerce without any fears of a security breach.