What is difference of developing a website in MVC and 3-Tier or N-tier architecture?

Question

What is difference of developing a website in MVC and 3-Tier or N-tier architecture?

Which one is better? What are pros and cons?

Answer 1

They're pretty much the same, however in 3-Tier, the top level (presentation) never directly communicates with the bottom layer (data persistence).

In model-view-controller, theoretically the Model is supposed to 'notify' the View that it has changed so that the View can update. However, this is usually not an issue in most web applications because they are stateless. I'm not sure if any well-known PHP MVC architectures have Views that directly communicate with Models or vice versa, but if they don't it would be correct to say that they are in fact 3-Tier.

Wikipedia says:

At first glance, the three tiers may seem similar to the MVC (Model View Controller) concept; however, topologically they are different. A fundamental rule in a three-tier architecture is the client tier never communicates directly with the data tier; in a three-tier model all communication must pass through the middleware tier. Conceptually the three-tier architecture is linear. However, the MVC architecture is triangular: the View sends updates to the Controller, the Controller updates the Model, and the View gets updated directly from the Model.

Source: Wikipedia: Multitier architecture