Presentation is Not Everything

 

Every so often, software designers come up to me and ask me for a word of advice. They're looking for a silver bullet to improve their design skills, and they'd like to know what, in my opinion, is the best software design principle.

My answer is generally that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. I can describe two or three of my favorite best practices, but at the end of the day, if you're still making some classic software development mistakes such as not reusing code or not writing automated unit tests, even the best design practices are not going to do you much good.

That being said, assuming that you're taking the time to adequately design your application and aren't following a hack and fix software development process, I would say that one very important yet highly overlooked software design principle for complex Web-based applications is separating the presentation layer and the business logic.

Benefits of a 3-Tier architecture

Senior designers understand that they're better off integrating their distribution application to a third party data storage system rather than implementing their own. There are so many commercial and open-source data storage systems out there that developing your own solution in-house would be a total waste of time--unless you compete in the data storage arena!

While most solutions integrate to a third party data …

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