Kevin,

>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?

Whoa, hold on there...

Don't assume that n-tier will double your development efforts. Not at all. I previously said that a good framework that is designed for logical n-tier could give you great flexibility in physical deployment options.

Also, a good framework designed for logical n-tier will provide standard data access classes and business object classes that you will just subclass, set a few properties, and perhaps add custom methods as needed for each.

Here at EPS, our internal framework has a data access layer that doesn't change from one project to another. So, there is NO additional effort required there. The business object layer is easily subclassed for each object from a standard business object class that has tremendous flexibility built into it.

The key is building your application in a smart, object-oriented way, using a capable framework that is designed for logical n-tier development. Going that route, you may actually cut your development time from a non-n-tier approach, in addition to gaining the flexibility and ease of future changes.

>I haven't read 1 success story based on this system of development yet.

How many failure stories have you read based on this system of development?