Presentation in a three-tier architecture.

Lately, I have been thinking about the presentation layer in a three-tier architecture. Presentation have almost exclusively been performed, on my part at least, using some OS specific API and/or some portable system like wxWidgets. In a three-tier architecture, however, the presentation part of an application can be something else. After all, that is the whole idea about separating the layers in the first place. Well, what is this "three-tier" thing anyway? For those of you are not so familiar with it... In a three-tier architecture, the application is layered in three levels, commonly referred to as the presentation tier, the logic tier and the data tier. Wikipedia has this nice image that explains some of this:

If you are reading this post in a web browser, then the probability is quite high that you have a relativley advanced platform for displaying text, graphics and even multimedia right there. Right there, in your browser! So, why not use the web browser for the presentation layer when implementing applications? Of course, web apps already makes use of this. In the consulting business that my company is into, plots and graphs of various measurements are often required by the stakeholders or customers. So, the presentation layer has to be able to present the various plots in a nice GUI. Traditionally, this has been performed by some graphics library tied to the platform in use which is not very good if the platform should evolve to something else. It is better to have a very clear separation between the layers. In a modern browser, presentation of the plots and graphs should be a relatively easy task. Especially now, with packages like jQuery and Flot. I have searched and searched for a good in-browser plotting faciliy and so far, Flot seem to be the most promising for my requirements. There is one drawback with every code that I have looked into up to now, not one of them has the built in capability to have one or more logarithmic axes. Please don't hesitate to comment to this post if you know of a package that can plot data on a logarithmic scale. I will be fast to switch to a web browser application develoment if, or rather when, such a packade arrive.