Where can I find a dead-simple explanation of MVC?

Question

At my company we\'re about to build a new site using ASP.NET MVC. My boss (marketing guy) would like to know some more about the technology so I\'ve tried to find a really g

Answer 1

To a marketing guy, perhaps the best way to explain the reason for ASP.Net MVC is the ability to broaden your product's reach.

By using MVC, the code is already separated in a fashion that will let you more easily build an interface that feels natural on a desktop, and then the different interface that caters to a general mobile device user, and a still-slightly-different interface that caters to an iPhone user, without risking the backend code getting out of sync and introducing subtle and company-harming bugs. And, if there's a smart client desktop app that could be a product... it, too, can rest on the same codebase.

The Model is "how things work inside the box". The Controller is "what you can touch on the outside of the box" and the view is "what comes out of the box"...

Answer 2

You have to explain the benefits of ASP.NET MVC, not the features

1. You have control over your URLs -- that means SEO for the site will be better -- that means your site will be higher in google

2. The code is cleaner, which means that it's easier to change, which means that you can add features faster

etc.

How do you save money, make money, reduce risk? That's what your boss wants to know.

Answer 3

The important word in the title of the manager in this case is "marketing." He is a Marketing manager. The concerns one has as a marketing manager have to do with strategy and tactics. These two are not the same thing. Strategy is the big picture word that embraces among other things how a company conceptually addresses customer needs and how the company differentiates itself from its competition. Strategy is typically not what software can portray to a user. Tactics, on the other hand, are the direct methods or approaches that a company takes in winning the business of the customer. Tactics tend to change far more frequently than strategies, and it is likely that the marketing manager, when he asks what advantage MVC may give him, is really asking, "How rapidly can you change whatever it is that you create into something that conforms to new realities in the way we have to deal with customers." In other words, how quickly can you change an offer of "buy 1 and get 1 free" into "buy 2 on Friday and get 1 on the following Tuesday if it is raining in Albany."

Marketing management is about results measured in dollars and cents, not finery and nuanced explanations that are littered with conceptual words lacking any real specificity. Everything a programmer may say might make sense to himself, but a marketing manager needs to know the real likelihood of rapid response to changing customer perceptions or rapid implementation to a different approach to selling to the same customers. He needs to know if it will cost more than an existing method because if he sells $1 million more in product while spending $1.25 million in software development, he will probably lose his job.

So, in short, he is looking for flexibility and cost-effectiveness. He needs software that be adapted to changing conditions quickly, just as he changes his pitch first one way and then another to a difficult-to-persuade prospective customer, and he needs to know that he won't have to be liable for a huge price tag for that flexibility.

Frankly, I don't think that you would be able to deliver on such promises if they were made because in spite of all the advantages of MVC from a development point of view, we are still talking about software here, and as we all know, software is a rigid, demanding taskmaster that takes it own sweet time to mature to the point of trustworthiness and to be rid of its bugs. We as programmers are always in search of the holy grail of software reusability, and while we flail about trying one thing and then another (MVC, MVP, MVVM, and whatever else someone may conceive), the rest of the world is simply asking for something that works. So the best of luck to you. I hope you are able to win your case.

Answer 4

The most important thing for your marketing guy is money, budget, TCO ...

When you don't use MVC you usually mix design, application logic etc. alltogether.

Programmer then must know html design, programming etc... That could mean you need powerful professional to do it all.

if you use MVC, everything is divided into "separate parts". Html coder can prepare html layer, programmer only works with application logic etc...

MVC brings better granularity and everybody can focus on what he or she can do the best!

Listen, for example xhtml validity and css cleanliness is so hard that there is a lot of people who focuses only on this while lot of browsers and platforms compatibility on mind.

Usually one person is NOT the best asp.net programmer, xhtml coder in one ;-)

Answer 5

This is a pretty simple one

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller#Pattern_description

The best way I can thing of is that the model is the data representation, the view is the presentation to the user and the controller is what collects user interaction that changes the model.

Answer 6

The model is the data access layer, which can just be a wrapper for a few simple queries to an ORM that manages the data entity relationships itself. It handles communication to the data source, retrieves data and usually organizes it into objects defined in your application.

The views are just html files with bits of html and css with some templating engine (smarty, mako, etc) code to display the data passed to it the way you want.

The controller puts it all together. Requests made to your page will be routed to a controller (class) and an action (method) within the controller. Just like any other application, the action will do what's requested of it, but it's still part of the controller.

So, the controller uses the model to query data (users, content, etc), then passes the data to a view to be rendered and displayed the way you want.