What Is MVC & Why Should One Go For It

What is MVC?

In short, MVC projects consist of at least 3 distinct areas of responsibility:

Models – Concerned with data modelling and capturing the project's business requirements.

Views – Presentation / user-interface components. A view generally provides a visual representation of data in the model(s). On a web site, these are usually web pages or HTML snippets.

Controllers – The engine room. Controllers facilitate the flow of data through the application. A controller will generally respond to some form of user-input, and then pass data to or from the model before handing another view back to the user.

So what does this actually mean? At it's simplest level, MVC encourages developers to break their projects down into manageable, independent components with clearly defined lines of responsibility.

Instead, using the MVC pattern we are encouraged to break apart the tightly coupled dependencies that can exist in typical implementations (e.g. the user interface should not need to know how to access the database), which leads to code that is more modular, easier to maintain, and much more robust.

What are the benefits of MVC?

There are many benefits to using the MVC approach, some of the more tangible ones are:

MVC's architecture makes it much easier for different team members to work independently on separate aspects of the system. For example, designers can work on the views without needing to understand how the underlying database technology works. Likewise, the programmer with no interest in user-interface design can focus solely on modelling the database and business requirements of the project.

MVC projects are very easy to test. Developers typically create ‘unit tests' which can be run automatically and allows them to quickly verify that each part of their application behaves as expected. Being able to break an application down into the loosely coupled components that MVC encourages is key to being able to create good unit tests.

MVC projects tend to be modular by nature, which makes it much easier to alter (or even rewrite) one part of the application without it adversely impacting on other areas. MVC makes it very easy to achieve Separation of Concerns (opens new window) – a key principal to writing code that is easy to maintain and refactor.

Where do we use MVC?

We work with plenty of legacy applications written using non-MVC frameworks, such as standard PHP, ASP, and ASP.NET Webforms sites. These all fulfil their purpose and certainly haven't become bad applications overnight! Likewise, we won't be abandoning popular products such as WordPress any time soon just because they aren't MVC based. However we have been shifting greenfield project development to MVC frameworks. Some of the MVC based solutions that we currently use are ASP.NET MVC, CodeIgniter – a PHP-based MVC framework, Joomla – an MVC-based CMS and Umbraco CMS – moving to ASP.NET MVC for its next release.

Of course, there is no such thing as a silver bullet in the Web development world and MVC is no exception. It's possible for a good web developer to craft elegant solutions no matter what architectural pattern or framework is used, just as no amount of ‘best practices' is going to save a poor developer from creating buggy, unmanageable code. But by encouraging you to adopt proven design patterns there’s no doubt that MVC empowers and encourages developers to create code that is elegant, reusable and robust – and that can only mean happier clients.