DEV Community

Unkown-Captain
Unkown-Captain

Posted on

What is a 3-tier application?

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
bizzibody profile image
Ian bradbury

There are many ways you could answer this question.

Really the answer is how many layers - or tiers - of responsibility are there. It is not uncommon to find 4 or more tier applications.

Example
3 tiers : Client (ie Browser), web server, database
3 tiers : Web server, application server, database

Web server talks to the application server. The web server is only responsible for receiving request and dispatching responses.
The application server is only responsible for accepting and processing requests, during which is might talk to a database.

Etc etc you can se where this is going.

The point is that by seperating responsibility you can focus each resource so that it is excellent at doing that one thing - securely and speedily.