Multi-Tier Application Programming with PHP

chapter 1

Introduction

Multi-tier software enables you to spread computing resources, which is to say, software components, across a network. By designing your software applications in such a way that their constituent parts exist on multiple machines, you can achieve greater reliability, better performance, easier management, and cost savings. In other words, multi-tier architecture gives you a head start in achieving what are usually the most important goals of software design.

This chapter explains the theory of multi-tier design and lays down a bit of background, conceptually and lexicographically. It also gets into the question of when you’d want to consider PHP and an open-source database server for implementing a multi-tier design, and ...