What the hell is a “Model-View-Controller”?

The Model-View-Controller Architecture, or MVC for short, is a way of programming that separates your application into three main parts:

1. the Model
2. the View
3. and (you guessed it) the Controller

Basically, the separation of these three allows developers to differentiate three aspects of your application:

1. Business Data (represented by the Model)
2. Presentation Data (represented by the View)
3. and Application Logic (represented by the Controller)

This allows for very rapid development – each aspect can be developed side by side by different developers at the same time. For example, we can have a designer working on the View and just allocating spaces where data will appear and at the same time, we can have a developer programming the Controller, who will just provide the View the data to be displayed. While all of this is being done, we can have another developer working on the Models, who will be in charge of retrieving data from the database and implementing the business-specific logic to them, and making sure that there are methods available for the Controller to be able to retrieve the data in different situations.

Continue reading →