Pierre, I think you are making a case that people are misusing the MVC name rather than including Drupal in the misuse. On Dec 11, 2009, at 11:03 AM, Pierre Rineau wrote:
On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 10:40 -0600, larry@garfieldtech.com wrote:
The defining attribute of MVC is, IMO, that the View component has direct access to the Model component using an observer relationship, without going through a separate Controller.
hook_page_alter() is in no way a direct observer relationship between the View component and the Model component. *_alter hooks are a pipes-and-filter approach, or, arguably, visitor pattern.
Drupal is very much not an MVC design. It's not true PAC either, but I have and do argue that it is closer to PAC than MVC.
Someone needs to correct the Wikipedia page, which is simply wrong in this regard.
--Larry Garfield
If you want to stick to strict MVC definition, yes Drupal is not, but in the most software I saw or developed with until now, not anyone had a real MVC implementation.
In MVC, this Controller -> Model -> View (data flow) In Drupal, data flow is: - Controller (menu router) -> Model (menu callback, module code) (direct association) - Model (indirect association through the theme() calls) -> View - View -> Controller (indirect association, through user clicks)
This is an incomplete and simple (without the observer/observable pattern) implementation, but I think it does sticks to MVC pattern.
This is an opinion, I think it can be discussed.
Hook system is a different pattern used for different goals, mostly used to alter data (it does not alter the behavior I described upper, except maybe in some really weird cases).
Pierre.
Event if observer pattern is not really here, I think it sticks to MVC pattern.