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I have done research on the different kinds of architectures but I'm still not too comfortable choosing between 3-tier and 4-tier.

What constitutes a 4-tier system?

My application is as follows:

The client is based on iOS iPhone app using MVC pattern.

The server is based on Ruby on Rails using MVC pattern as well. (certain views are rendered in HTML if requests don't come from iPhone)

The database is MySQL accessed by MySQL2 Gem.

The client and the server both access web services from Google's API and other webservices.

What is my system's architecture?

Leo Correa
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  • client-server. Anything else is semantics and marketing drivel – Marc B Apr 24 '12 at 02:24
  • To an extent, I agree with you but some professors would disagree with that. My confusion comes that some people would take that as a 4-tier architecture and some others as a 3-tier. – Leo Correa Apr 24 '12 at 02:43
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    Exactly. marketing people will claim it's 4-tier, because more tiers are better. Engineers will claim it's 3-tier, because fewer tiers means fewer potential failure points. Practical people will just say it's client-server and get on with life. CS profs will make life difficult because they couldn't hack it in the real world, so they've been reduced to teaching. – Marc B Apr 24 '12 at 02:45

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This is 4 tier on server side buddy

  • Model
  • View
  • Controller
  • Database - With tables and routines

Have you created a separate layer to handle the webservices work at server side, then its another layer, you can proudly call it n-tier; as long as your layers do not interfere with each other in a sense that a layer is doing the other layer should, you are good to go.

Brij Raj Singh - MSFT
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