Delphi and multi-tier architectures

In the previous chapter, we saw that you can use web services and cloud-hosted web APIs to create an information system where apps running on different devices can connect to the same data store. Not only you can use Delphi to integrate with existing web services, but you can also build your own.

Why would you build mobile backend services? Multi-tier architectures have a lot of benefits. But what exactly is a multi-tier solution? It’s an architecture in which client apps communicate with server apps to access underlying resources. Compared to a client/server application, which has the user interface (UI), the business logic, and the database access all combined (even if possibly logically divided into different modules, as we did for the todo app in Chapter 10), in a multi-tier scenario where the database access lives on the server, along the core of the business logic, the client app has only the UI and the limited business logic required...