CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesarchitecturemicroservices3-tier
Aravind
Aravind

Reputation: 590

What is the difference between a monolithic architecture and a 3-tier architecture?

I have an application which is packaged as a single ear file deployed on WebSphere. Inside the package, the code is organized in to UI files, Business Logic files and Database related files. Now, is this a monolithic application or a 3-tier architecture?

What is the difference?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 4872

Answers (2)

Chris
Chris

Reputation: 389

Remember that a EAR and what is in it is a packaging choice. Your same application can be deployed in multiple ears in multiple Java EE containers on one or more servers. The EJB-jars and WARs are intended to do that. With Java EE you choose how to distribute you application across the containers and nodes based on what make sense.

Technically a tiered application is one where the layers can be independently deployed, distributed and accessed. I.e. my business logic can be on 5 servers in 9 ejb containers and accessed by 3 user interfaces that could be desktop, mobile, web etc. And possibly parts of different applications.

The more traditional definition of a monolith was an application that wasn't tier. Specifically that its parts cannot be composed in to other applications at runtime

Upvotes: 0

Deepak Singhal
Deepak Singhal

Reputation: 10876

You are comparing wrong things. Monolithic application need to be compared against Micro Services. In monolithic application; you deploy all the features/api end-points in a single EAR/WAR file; i.e. single JVM. In micro-services they are deployed in multiple JVMs. Note that in Monolithic architecture also you have multiple REST end points exposed.

3 tier, or 2 tier or N tier architectures is a different concept. It says how many subsystems/modules your application is divided like database layer, client layer, application logic layer. Hence, monolithic as well microservices both can be n tier applications.

Upvotes: 6

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