What design pattern am I using?

Question

I've learned web application development and was initially overwhelmed at the number of schools of thought around design patterns and also at all of the many different frameworks and technologies that programmers were using.

I have settled upon a "pattern" of some sorts, and I'm wondering if it has a name, or if others have also been using this pattern, or if there is a better way of doing things. I use:

• HTML/CSS for presentation.
• JQuery AJAX calls to an ASP.NET ashx class for database (SQL Server) connectivity, which return JSON
• JSON is parsed and then displayed in the browser with JQuery

Answer 1

That's not a pattern. That's an architecture, specifically the 3-Tier architecture. The tiers you have are

1) View
2) Data processing (ASP/NET)
3) database

A design pattern is a code pattern for solving a general problem. For example, the Singleton pattern is a solution to the problem of making sure an application has only 1 instance of something.

An architecture is a general approach to how the application as a whole is designed. In your case, you have a web client, a processing layer, and a data layer.

Note that depending on your design, the client side code might be considered its own app, which might have its own architecture (e.g. an MVC architecture).