An Architect's View

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An Architect's View

Notes on MVC

December 5, 2004 · 7 Comments

I've been having an interesting conversion with Will Spurgeon as he's coming to terms with MVC. Will's done his research - which always impresses me - and in one email, he sent me a bunch of links, mostly on the c2 wiki, which discuss the history of MVC (it originated in Smalltalk) and its bastardization over the years into what we typically call MVC today (since most of us aren't Smalltalk programmers). I'm not going to re-hash the discussion, other than to note that the Smalltalk vision of MVC was notable for two things: the controller was simpler than we're used to today; there was typically a controller for each (complex) view. Anyway, here's the list of links he sent me - read them through in order and see what you think. I hope it will increase your understanding of MVC: I the observation that there are really two models at play here is very telling: the underlying model and an inspector-like application model that overlays the basic model.
View count: 697

Tags: architecture

7 responses so far ↓

  • 1 johnb // Dec 6, 2004 at 12:30 AM

    thanks for posting that Sean, I've been looking round for a decent pile of reading matter to get my head around all the terms i'm hearing/seeing thrown around - just what i needed.

    Now, if you could recommend 1 single book to get you r head round the subject, what would it be?

  • 2 Patrick Whittingham // Dec 6, 2004 at 6:55 AM

    Sean -

    I would like to view the pages, but I'm not allowed access.

    TIA,
    Pat

    this is the message ==

    Forbidden
    You don't have permission to access /cgi/wiki on this server.

  • 3 Sean Corfield // Dec 6, 2004 at 9:20 AM

    John, I couldn't name just one book. Just read everything you can find. Start with the recommendations in my bookstore:

    http://www.corfield.org/bookstore/

    Patrick, no idea why you're getting that error. All those links work just fine for me.

  • 4 Roger // Dec 6, 2004 at 10:14 AM

    I saw the same error Patrick received, but all is OK now. It appears to have just been a glitch on the server.
    Roger

  • 5 Patrick Whittingham // Dec 6, 2004 at 10:19 AM

    yep... it works fine for me now...thanks Roger for the heads-up.

    Pat

  • 6 Maxim Porges // Dec 7, 2004 at 5:38 PM

    Sites going down after a posting on corfield.org? Looks to me like sites might be getting "corfielded" in the same way that they get "slashdotted"... :)

    The road to understanding MVC is long and hard. I won't pretend I'm an expert, but I've come a long way over the years, and the benefits are many. The more you try to acheive good MVC separation, the more you understand it as a philosophy, and find yourself "feeling" when a design is good or bad from an MVC perspective.

    - max

  • 7 Hal Helms // Dec 7, 2004 at 6:12 PM

    I first learned MVC with Smalltalk at Xerox PARC where the instructor sang "Model-View-Controller" to the tune of "Some Enchanted Evening". I don't think it's really all that hard: the view we all understand and the controller just links the view to the model. It's the domain model that should occupy most of our interest: this is where we can get the biggest bang for our architectural buck.

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