Model-View-Controller — Misunderstood and Misused

paradox1x writes "Malcolm Tredinnick shares a terrific rant against the misunderstanding and misuse of the Model-View-Controller design pattern. In particular he takes issue with the notion that Django should be considered an MVC framework. He says that 'It's as valid as saying it's a "circus support mechanism," since the statement is both true, in some contexts, and false in others (you can definitely use Django-based code to help run your circus; stop looking so skeptical).' I'm not sure I agree with the entire piece, but it is a very good read." We recently discussed another look at the bending and stretching of MVC patterns in the world of Web development.

Comments

Re:Author is Pedantic

[lgw]

Old-school developers liek myself have a significant problem with Design Pattern: they're new and confusing names for old ideas. Almost everything in the Gang of Four's book, for example, was some work-around for some limitation of C++. For example, I have to look up what the "strategy" pattern means, but I know how to pass a function in a language with first-class functions.

To anyone with a strong grounding in Computer Science, the Strategy pattern doesn't need a name - it's simply "The picture processing code of images takes a function as input".

And in any case mostof the fresh college hires I work with don't know what the "Stategy" pattern is (without looking it up) *either*, so giving it a name doesn't help the conversation at all. But I can tell them "don't hard-code your algorithm choices in a switch-case, store a pointer (function pointer, interface-typed pointer, whatever) as a member and call that" they understand both *what* I'm talking about and *why*.

With MVC in particular, it's received wisdom that all good GUI code is MVC, so of course all GUI code will be documented as ussing MVC. The clarity of term has been destroyed by the hype.