[DUG] Demoing at a DUG Meeting - Accredo or otherwise

[Allan, Samuel]

>> My advice
>> would be in order to grow your product (and I forsee it being a v 
>> difficult market in the next few years esp if M$ start playing
tricks) 
>> would be expose your layers 6 ways from sunday, use MSSQL in a 
>> INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE mode, middle tier all the data integrity (RI in 
>> the DB but that can be done in a case tool) COM business objects and 
>> trade on your excellent UI skills, Then you would be a seroius 
>> contender for MySAP, Narvision etc

>Nice design, but not one that can be installed or supported us or by
our
>existing partners. We have not gone down this route exactly because we 
>don't want to alienate our existing dealers, support people and 
>customers. It's a business decision, not a programming one.

Please forgive my ignorance, but how would adding a middle tier make it
impossible or probibitively difficult to install or support your
software?

I can see it would be "inconvient" to have to re-install your clients,
and to install the middle tier onto a computer (the same one as the
database runs on maybe?), but surely this isn't that much more complex?
You allready have to configure connections to the DB, why not just
replace this with connections to the application server? I can't see why
it couldn't be automated to the same level as your existing install.

I would have thought that the reasons for not re-architecting your
application would have more to do with the costs of re-developing an
allready "finished" product, and the risks of introducing bugs into what
is currently stable, compared to the benefits (whatever they are) of a
three tier architecture.

I have no opinion myself as to what is the best decision, one way or the
other, I just want to be a better person for knowing why you think it is
infeasible.

Samuel