Matt Prokes

Alpha Edition!, e-mail spelling/grammer/topic suggestions to mattprokes@gmail.com

The Professional Developer Series
Volume 2, Web Development
Chapter 1.4 Web Development Trends
Page: #23

The Model View Controller (MVC) pattern has been around for years, and now more then ever it is being applied to web applications. We will be discussing more about how to implement it in your webapplications later on, but for now we just need to familiarize ourselves with what it is all about. Originally MVC was based on research done by Xerox in 1979, but really microsoft made it popular during the 90′s, when at that time a rapid evolution of user interfaces was occuring and a architectural pattern was required for managing the new complexity desktop applications were presenting.

Lets fast forward to 2008, MVC is used more then ever, and even after 20 years of popularity it is still very relevent. While not all web applications have completly migrated to using MVC, it is a trend that is still evolving and emerging as web applications (like desktop applications) become more complexed and require an architecture to manage that complexity. As a result, projects which we develop in this book will also follow a model view controller methodology.

The thing that makes MVC so great is the natural seperation of functionality, it does this by splitting applications up into natural components which serve a specific purpose such as data access (Model), Execution, and Initialization (Controller), and Interface Code (Controller). These days MVC may actually be implemented on the server side to deliver data to a client, as well as on the client side. MVC is just one of many architectural patterns, and is often mixed with other patterns that we will talk about later in the book (part 2).

This book is not about design patterns, though we will be leveraging some. I would suggest though that you read up a bit on some traditional design patterns after completing this book so you can get an idea of how you might architect your own systems in a more straight-forward manner. What we will be using is design patterns that are highly relevent to todays’ webapplication systems. You will find nuggets of web architecture suggestions later in reading.

List of architectural patterns, application architecture (simlar to house architecture).
List of  design patterns, code architecture (or common patterns in code styles)

Tags: web developer 1.4

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