Remoting -v- Enterprise Services -v- Web-services

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A Mackie - 29 Jun 2004 13:38 GMT

With Microsoft (Richard Turner) now suggesting Enterprise Services for
the internal tiers of applications, and minimizing the use of remoting
(a "last resort" option?), what are people's thoughts on technologies
for new n-tier applications in WAN/Internet environments ?

Scenario:
Application tiers all on physically separate machines:

1. client UI (smart-client and/or browser) - geographically dispersed
2. Presentation layer (e.g. IIS for browsers) - external network zone
3. Business layer/data-access layer - on internal network zone
4. Database (SQL ServeR)

What to use for the internal tiers of an application
(intra-application) - i.e. presentation layer talking to business layer
?

Options:
Web-services - good for integrating with other apps, but should it be
used between tiers of an app ? Is performance reduced significantly ?

Enterprise Services - uses DCOM => security configuration & firewall
nightmares ? Is this so ?

Remoting - high performance, but is it legacy, becoming deprecated ?

Thoughts on this ?

Thanks,
Andy Mackie

------------------------------------------------------------
references:
Richard Turner's blog and video interview:
http://blogs.msdn.com/richturner666/archive/2004/03/05/84771.aspx
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9990

Remoting -v- Enterprise Services debate:
http://www.theserverside.net/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=26839
http://www.lhotka.net/WeBlog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=0830a0e4-18bb-4182-99a7
-a0c727fb913a

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Allen Anderson - 29 Jun 2004 15:00 GMT

this debate has really been raging for the past several months. I
personally think remoting is a better solution for most applications.
However the author there does make some good points about ES in that
the COM+ infrastructure provides a lot of things like object pooling,
clustering, etc. The real downside to using ES is that its overkill
for many applications. However, it does have its upsides and it would
seem that MS thinks that it might be a better migration path to
Indigo.

Allen Anderson
http://www.glacialcomponents.com
mailto: allen@put my website base here.com

>With Microsoft (Richard Turner) now suggesting Enterprise Services for
>the internal tiers of applications, and minimizing the use of remoting
[quoted text clipped - 37 lines]
>http://www.lhotka.net/WeBlog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=0830a0e4-18bb-4182-99a7
>-a0c727fb913a

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A Mackie - 29 Jun 2004 16:23 GMT

> this debate has really been raging for the past several months.

Was any consensus reached ? The debate has just started raging where I
work! :-)

I've saw numerous articles, but they typically read like this - "in
some cases remoting is best, in other cases web-services is good, then
again, you might want Enterprise Services". Hmmm, very helpful!

Thanks,
Andy.

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Richard Bell - 30 Jun 2004 13:17 GMT

As regards client to server communication, in our minds it depends on who
the target client is. If you want total flexibility, web services would
appear to be the way to go because you are not restricting your client to a
particular operating system or runtime environment. We tend to try and
design our service objects so that they can (at least partially) operate in
a web service scenario, albeit typically with reduced functionality.

As regards Enterprise Services, we do find that lot's of our middle tier
objects end up going in COM+ for the simple reason that we cannot be sure at
design time whether or not they will end up as part of a transaction. To my
mind, along with resource sharing via object pooling etc., that was the
major thrust of all the Roger Sessions little goblin stuff. Make objects
responsible only for doing their job and let the framework deal with the
transaction.

For what it's worth, our guess is that Enterprise Services, or something
like it, is here to stay and that the overhead of using it will be reduced
as the functionality becomes more closely tied into the .Net runtime.

> > this debate has really been raging for the past several months.
>
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> Thanks,
> Andy.

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Remoting -v- Enterprise Services -v- Web-services

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