Advanced Object Oriented Programming with Visual FoxPro 6.0

Conclusion

Three-tiered development isn't as difficult as many people would have you believe. The easiest way to get started is to create a small prototype that handles some dummy data. Try to keep the data in different databases and create different interfaces, following the rules outlined in this chapter. Once you are more comfortable with this approach, you can try to create different logic components that can be swapped (static at first, and dynamic later on). You will soon realize the advantages of this approach, and I promise you, once you get used to the slightly different way of doing things (and the handful of complications), you won't want to go back to the old way. In fact, single-tiered applications now seem like source-code chaos to me. Three-tiered design helped me to raise the quality of my code tremendously not only because of the obvious advantages I laid out in this chapter. Many design questions, such as what classes should be based on your own set of base classes, will become easy to answer once you take this well-organized approach.