MVC Family Tree

mvc.givan.se

32 points·givanse··7 comments

One persistent source of ambiguity is the arrow from the controller to the view. I've seen so many implementations that take this to mean that in response to a user action the controller modifies the model and updates the view, rather than letting the view observe the model.

My understanding of that arrow is that the controller may send messages to the view.

I think there's different approaches. Apple, for instance, approaches MVC that way (controller updating the view, with the view having no knowledge of the model).

Right, there are different ways of doing it. In general, an arrow/line between Controller and View is better understood as "there is some type of communication"; then, different variations of the same design will use different forms of communication (observers, data binding, the controller references the view, the view references the controller etc).

The "significant" list is a bit biased. Also Struts but no Spring?

From what I gathered, Struts was very influential. Many people have it as its main reference. (Rails for example)

I don't know much about Spring. I know is very popular in the Java community, but I don't think it brought much to the MVC ecosystem.

It seems like it was built as a more developer friendly framework, but at its core it still is good old J2EE. Same patterns, MVC style etc. right?

interesting graph. would be interesting to see what part of MVC is related to system software vs. web MVC

What do you mean with "system software"?

One of the main differences between Client/Browser MVC and Server MVC is application state. In the browser you have state. In the server, since HTTP is stateless the server app too. Probably a good topic for an article of its own.

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