ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

3.1. Problem

Our web site is made up of a number of separate modules for managing dynamic content such as articles, forums and polls, and sending out newsletters. However, all our modules have a number of common "design problems" that we must solve:

• Separate the data access code from the business logic code and from the presentation code (user interface) so that the site is much more maintainable and scalable. This is called a multi-tier design.

• Isolate the data access architecture so that it can allow the support of different underlying data stores—without requiring changes to the business object layer when the underlying data store. Similarly, changes to the business object or presentation layers should also be possible without changing another tier. This is called decoupling the tiers.

• Design the business object architecture to expose the data retrieved by the data access layer in an object-oriented format. This is the process of mapping relational data to OOP classes.

• Support caching of business objects to save the data we've already fetched from the data store so we don't have to make unnecessary fetches to retrieve the same data again. This results in less CPU usage, database resources, and network traffic, and thus results in better general performance.

• Handle and log exceptions, and other important events such as the deletion of a record, to help diagnose problems in the event of a system failure, and to provide an audit trail.

• Store the site and modules' configuration settings ...