On Sunday 03 September 2006 08:40, Frando (Franz Heinzmann) wrote:
I've to say Mark's ideas are quite similar to something I thaught about sometimes. Recently, I realized a project based on CakePHP [1], a RoR-style MVC framework written in PHP. And I was just amazed how quick, clean and easy it is to realize what you want to have by using it. It would be great to have some more of the easy and simple way of development that comes with a good and well-done implentation of the MVC concepts. I'm not at all one of these guys who praise the MVC pattern as The One Way Of Web Development or The New Holy Grail, but my experiences with CakePHP showed, that, if it's done in a good way, the MVC pattern is a robust, solid and rapid way of web development that can simplify web development in a good way.
Excuse me a moment while I get somewhat academically pedantic, but believe me there is a point to the following. :-) MVC is a terrible pattern for web apps. MVC really isn't possible for web apps. I've seen only one architecture that tried to do actual MVC for a web app, and it's a complete and total disaster. Why then do people always talk about MVC as the bees knees? Because what they're calling MVC isn't; it's a bastardized MVC/PAC hybrid. MVC involves three distinct components: A data Model, a View component, and a Controller component. The Model abstracts the data model of the system, the View component is the UI, and the Controller is an intermediary. OK, no big deal, we all know that; but there's an important detail that many forget: The View is the entirety of the connection to the outside world. The View is both input and output into the system, and therefore must be an active component. The user changes something in the state of the View. The Controller, which is observing (Observer pattern) the View, notices the change. It responds by (possibly) taking some action against the Model, which only the Controller can change. The Model is then updated, and the View, which is in turn observing the Model, notices the change and makes read-only calls against it to update its own display. Why does this not work for web apps? Because the browser (view) is stateless. You can't run an active observer over an HTTP connection. If you're doing heavy Ajax then you can do the read-only calls against the model, but you still need to notify the Controller of changes actively, in a second HTTP call. That's wasteful. Drupal doesn't do MVC currently. If it did, theme functions would be full of database calls, when that is actively discouraged. :-) What Drupal does currently, and what makes much more sense in a web app, is PAC, Presentation-Abstraction-Control. In PAC, input comes in via the Control component. Control then reads and writes data to the Abstraction (data model), decides what to do, and sends raw data to the Presentation component, which in turn renders and outputs it. A given PAC combination, or agent, can be paired with another or even daisy chained in parallel or sequence to do all kinds of funky things. But the input always comes in the Control and output goes out through the Presentation. Drupal's menu system is its Control component. The theme system is the Presentation component. The node system is the Abstraction component. Separate PAC agents aren't really separated out, but they do map rather nicely to the block concept; each block built by a separate agent. We kinda sorta do that now, but not formalized. So I'm all for clean separation of system components in Drupal, really. But let's keep in mind how we're doing it, and what the limitations are of a web-based system. MVC is the buzzword for web apps only because Sun Java engineers thought it was cool, not because it actually fits well. :-) Yes, it's a pedantic point, but it always bothers me when people talk about web apps as MVC, when in fact they simply cannot be by nature. :-) </rant> -- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson