Hi Kevin,
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>But can you justify the extra time spent going the n-tier route? For a large project you could look at doubling dev-time, if the project is a 3 year project, and going n-tier moves it to 6 years, are you ever going to get that dev-time back via the future rewards of choosing such an architecture?
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I think a lot of that extra time would apply to the learning curve for OOP and n-Tier. IMO, those already proficient with n-Tier (not me <g>) would not take twice as long to develop the app. They have developed the expertise, frameworks, and tools over the years to speed up the process. They would not think of developing an app in another manner, because they have worked so hard to build flexibility into their frameworks and processes.

Starting from scratch with vanilla VFP, there is no question that working with native tables in a single-tier fashion is faster. But you don't need to start from scratch. You can buy a commercial framework, or develop your own. New features like the CursorAdapter in VFP8 will speed things up as well.

That being said, we don't use n-Tier for every app. We developed a small app for internal use recently, and it accesses native tables directly. But as I think about it, the need could easily arise for it to be a web app or web service. IMO, that line of thinking could probably apply to a lot of database apps.