Moving the business logic tier to the client. Cost-effective distributed computing for the WWW

The Internet and the WWW have encouraged the adoption of a three-tiered arc hitectural style as the general framework for distributed computing. The th in client concept associated with this model is the most suitable for the W WW, because it can be easily mapped to the browser concept. Additionally, t he separation of business logic (middle tier) and back-end services enable further flexibility for the design of this kind of service. Nevertheless, t he advent of platform-independent software models like Java and the availab ility of common off-the-shelf services, like FTP or HTTP, offer new opportu nities to more classical distributed computing models. In this paper we rev isit the two,tiered model for Internet environments, and show that the fat client (user interface plus business logic) may still be valid, at least in some environments. We propose two solutions to provide full FTP access fro m a Java applet. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.