The Beauty of MVC

The widely-known Model-View-Controller pattern was published first in 1988 (by Krasner & Pope). It was originally indented to represent user mental models and so on, and while some people may want to superseed it with new paradigms, today I want to talk about its beauty.

Because MVC not [only] models the user's mental model, it models the world.

It's nothing else, than a practical implementation of Hegelian dialectic.

Let's start with a simple scheme. The user sits besides a computer. [S]he looks at the monitor, while trying to achieve something by pressing buttons on the keyboard, or trying to wander around with a mouse or on a touchpad.

Generally, we don't really distinguish between the different input peripherials with MVC. The monitor is the output, other human-computer interface peripherials are for input, it's that easy:



(Based on image of flickr user ntr23 under Creative commons license)