DevForce is designed to support an application with three major layers, a data layer, a back-end service layer, and a client layer. The DevForce architecture is also layered with components that contribute to the application’s service and client layers.
Layers are logical grouping of code that could all be running on a single machine. Most production DevForce applications locate these layers on separate processes running in separate machines. These separate physical locations are called tiers.
Most DevForce applications are configured to run on either two or three tiers. We describe the DevForce architecture in terms of the most common arrangement: a three tier, Rich Internet Application (RIA).
DevForce architecture showing the data tier, application server tier, client tier, entities, and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).