Web application architecture question

Question

We're planning to develop a medium - larger sized web appliaction

• mostly CRUD operations
• reporting
• intranet/internet ready

Someone had an idea to split the application into two separete solutions

1. ASP.NET Web application - frontend
2. Core application - data access,domain logic.. hosted in a windows service

The communication would be realized with WCF (tcp,named pipes)

I'm wondering what are the cons and pros of this solution ?

Mostly I'm worried about that the development proces will get to complex. All this communication over WCF.

Could you please share some thoughs or have you any experiences with a similar project ?

Answer 1

This is one way to look at it, but if you code your application in a 'standard' n-tier fashion, so that the web front end is not relying on concrete classes from your back end, you 'could' put this in later on if needed, but doing it up front 'just in case' adds a lot of complexity to your system.

Another approach is the ability to put your application in a web farm with a load balancer - this reduces your code complexity and allows you scale out as required.

(I'd also note that 100 concurrent users isn't really all that large).