What is MVC and what are the advantages of it? [closed]

Answer 1

MVC is the separation of model, view and controller — nothing more, nothing less. It's simply a paradigm; an ideal that you should have in the back of your mind when designing classes. Avoid mixing code from the three categories into one class.

For example, while a table grid view should obviously present data once shown, it should not have code on where to retrieve the data from, or what its native structure (the model) is like. Likewise, while it may have a function to sum up a column, the actual summing is supposed to happen in the controller.

A 'save file' dialog (view) ultimately passes the path, once picked by the user, on to the controller, which then asks the model for the data, and does the actual saving.

This separation of responsibilities allows flexibility down the road. For example, because the view doesn't care about the underlying model, supporting multiple file formats is easier: just add a model subclass for each.

Answer 2

One of the major advantages of MVC which has not mentioned here is that MVC provides RESTful urls which enables SEO. When you name your Controllers and Actions wisely, it makes it easier for search engines to find your site if they only take a look at your site Urls. For example you have a car sale website and a page which displays available Lamborghini Veneno cars, instead of having www.MyCarSale.com/product/6548 referring to the page you can choose www.MyCarSale.com/SportCar/Lamborghini-Veneno url for SEO purpose.

Here is a good answer to MVC Advantages and here is an article How to create a SEO friendly Url.

Answer 3

Separation of concerns is the biggy.

Being able to tease these components apart makes the code easier to re-use and independently test. If you don't actually know what MVC is, be careful about trying to understand people's opinions as there is still some contention about what the "Model" is (whether it is the business objects/DataSets/DataTables or if it represents the underlying service layer).

I've seen all sorts of implementations that call themselves MVC but aren't exactly and as the comments in Jeff's article show MVC is a contentious point that I don't think developers will ever fully agree upon.

A good round up of all of the different MVC types is available here.

Answer 4

One con I can think of is if you need really fast access to your data in your view (for example, game animation data like bone positions.) It is very inefficient to keep a layer of separation in this case.

Otherwise, for most other applications which are more data driven than graphics driven, it seems like a logical way to drive a UI.

Answer 5

MVC is just a general design pattern that, in the context of lean web app development, makes it easy for the developer to keep the HTML markup in an app’s presentation layer (the view) separate from the methods that receive and handle client requests (the controllers) and the data representations that are returned within the view (the models). It’s all about separation of concerns, that is, keeping code that serves one functional purpose (e.g. handling client requests) sequestered from code that serves an entirely different functional purpose (e.g. representing data).

It’s the same principle for why anybody who’s spent more than 5 min trying to build a website can appreciate the need to keep your HTML markup, JavaScript, and CSS in separate files: If you just dump all of your code into a single file, you end up with spaghetti that’s virtually un-editable later on.

Since you asked for possible "cons": I’m no authority on software architecture design, but based on my experience developing in MVC, I think it’s also important to point out that following a strict, no-frills MVC design pattern is most useful for 1) lightweight web apps, or 2) as the UI layer of a larger enterprise app. I’m surprised this specification isn’t talked about more, because MVC contains no explicit definitions for your business logic, domain models, or really anything in the data access layer of your app. When I started developing in ASP.NET MVC (i.e. before I knew other software architectures even existed), I would end up with very bloated controllers or even view models chock full of business logic that, had I been working on enterprise applications, would have made it difficult for other devs who were unfamiliar with my code to modify (i.e. more spaghetti).

Answer 6

I think another benefit of using the MVC pattern is that it opens up the doors to other approaches to the design, such as MVP/Presenter first and the many other MV* patterns.

Without this fundamental segregation of the design "components" the adoption of these techniques would be much more difficult.

I think it helps to make your code even more interface-based.. Not only within the individual project, but you can almost start to develop common "views" which mean you can template lot more of the "grunt" code used in your applications. For example, a very abstract "data view" which simply takes a bunch of data and throws it to a common grid layout.

Edit:

If I remember correctly, this is a pretty good podcast on MV* patterns (listened to it a while ago!)