Improving Performance and Scalability of Fiji National University Campus Information System Using N-Tier Architecture

Software architecture is very important in the development of large scale software solution and plays a very active role in achieving business goals. This research is an attempt to utilize the N-Tier software architecture for developing a prototype campus information system for Fiji National University FNU-CIS, to address the issue of performance and scalability. To assist in the design and implementation of FNU-CIS, an extensive evaluation of campus information systems is carried out to provide the bench mark on the current technology. FNU-CIS software architecture is designed with the implementation using JEE and CORBA. Experiments were carried out to assess the performance and scalability of the newly developed system. Several tests were carried out to measure the response time, throughput and latency of our system in distributed settings, and the results mainly favored FNU-CIS. This research makes a significant contribution to the field of software engineering in today's world where performance and scalability of IT applications are often equated with better business, the process and techniques used in building such systems is paramount. The ideas presented in this paper can be easily utilized for the development of other large scale systems with similar issues such as performance and scalability to be addressed.