The Internet has transformed from a mere publishing medium to an important communication and business facility. Among the many vendors that provide web-based solutions, multi-tiered system architecture became extremely popular. Developing with multiple tiers increases the scalability, performance, and reliability of distributed applications. Server components can be distributed across any number of servers to boost system availability. Rapid modification to these components is possible when business rules or economic conditions dictate. And the location-independence of these components allows system administrators to easily reconfigure system load. The challenge to IT professionals today is to efficiently develop and deploy applications for use on both corporate intranets and over the Internet. Among multi-tiered system architecture, three-tiered client/server architecture provides an environment which supports all of the benefits of both the one-tiered approach and the two-tiered approach while supporting the goals of a flexible architecture.   Development Challenges There are many challenges in the development world while “write once, run anywhere” is still the leading challenge. Development teams are still divided into two camps: J2EE vs. .NET. Both platforms come with their advantages and disadvantages which we will be discussing on their related pages. It is, however, important to summarize them in a table for ease of reference. Vendor lock-in, scalability, and leveraging existing technology investments are among the challenges developers are faced with these days. Vendor lock-in stems from vendor strategies that may include introducing (through ease of use) proprietary extensions through IDE platform; the major issue with vendor lock-in is that the code will not be transportable to another platform without rewriting the code. Scalability will be achieved through component based development and abstraction of tiers that facilitates the scalability with increasing workloads. Leveraging existing technology investments is becoming a serious concern for development (although this rule applies to any information technology investment) since the technology cycle began lapsing in months, rather than years; as a result, it became essential to leverage existing technologies rather than re-investing in infrastructure and applications each year. In summary, our teams focus on the following key issues: open-source rules, web services, platform wars (J2EE vs. .NET), shorter development cycles, and especially the “write once, run anywhere” methodology. back to Development   Trademark Acknowledgements Any company, product or service names are trademarks or service marks of their respective companies.