Is there any difference between the onion architecture and a pattern where the controller only has services or DAO's wired into it and all business logic is encapsulated within services, DAO's contain only the data access code and are used by services and controllers (its layered but open), the controller is the only entry point for requests, a mapper pattern is used to map data access objects to model objects and everything is auto-wired and using inversion of control and interfaces?
What I have described is a pretty common pattern when using the spring framework for java and when reading this blog post and looking at the flattened diagram it does not (to me) look any different.
Is this spring pattern, which I have never heard a formal name other than MVC or MVCS for actually the onion architecture?