CRUD Applications and the Business Layer: A Practical Perspective

I had a great discussion with my supervisor about application architecture.

The question at hand was, what’s the value of the Business Layer? Most applications I’ve worked on are CRUD applications. Is there any value in a thin veneer over the data layer?

In my experience, most business layers consist of pass through methods.

If there isn’t any value, call the data layer directly. Handle the business logic on a case-by-case basis. In most cases this will entail creating a service class to encapsulate the business logic.

In the end, having a business layer that provides nothing but pass through methods is pre-optimization. It’s the “it will save me down the road” mentality. 95% of the time, it’s a waste, it creates multiple of points of change and it decreases maintainability.