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Model View Controller vs Boundary Control Entity
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I'm not sure if i got the right concept.
I was told by people that
Boundary = View
Entity = Model
Control = Controller
however based on my knowledge of MVC. (fat model, thin controller)
Isn't the Boundary = Controller, Control = Model (the busienss logic) and Entity = Model (The orm classes or similar entity classes which does only crud ).
I may be wrong, please guide me!
The two are very similar. The main difference is that MVC is typically used in user interface design whereas ECB is most often used in business logic. Here's a portion of a presentation by Adam Bien, who is known for promoting ECB, that helped me understand the difference between the two.
Actually your first definition is simply correct. The meaning of words is sometimes confusing. The following link confirms and summarizes both patterns (naming ECB a variant of MVC): The Entity-Control-Boundary Pattern
Your explanation is correct. But they are not similar. MVC is for user interaction. Business rules are not bound to users directly and even not I/O devices like the internet itself. The ECB pattern is used for separating business entities from the boundary (mvc framework, ORM's). Entities are business objects, they know nothing about databases, orm's. The control is not a controller like in MVC, it can be a Command which represents a use case. Only the Control may access the business entities. Business entities are a world of their own, completely isolated from the MVC layer. It can be a business framework with patterns, principles, types and separated layers of its own, that does not wish to interact with anything related to I/O.
We can combine MVC with ECB like this:
User <-> Controller [Boundary] <-> Control (use case) [Control] <-> Business entities [Entity] <-> Other business entities [Entity]
Related
I am confused about how model and view can interact
I was making a simple to do app with mvc pattern and I saw an article which said you shouldn't pass the model values directly to the view, which made the project more complex than I thought (I am relatively new to programming and this is the first time I am trying out a design pattern).
But then later on I talked to someone who said that that is not true and you can send the model data directly to view, he didn't even use classes or some kind of grouping to separate the function he just put them in separate files.
I was wondering if there is a guideline that I couldn't find or we can do whatever we want as long as they are kind of separated. I would love an article or a guide to read up on as well.
Since, I am not 100% sure the context in which you are trying to apply the MVC pattern, a good generic explanation of MVC can be found in GoF's 1995 book, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software.
In the book, they state the following.
The Model is the application object, the View is its screen
presentation, and the Controller defines the way the user interface
reacts to user input.
A more robust explanation can be found from Martin Fowler where he also
makes the case for a variation of Model View Controller that uses a Presentation Model.
If you are referring to Spring MVC then there is some magic that blurs the lines a bit. But in general, you have a controller that represents some screen or an encapsulated piece of functionality that the user (web requests) interact with. The controller serves up responses that are derived from the domain, usually via a Spring Service (i.e. #Service). The domain (Model) doesn't know anything about the View and the View may or may not know anything about the domain.
Given that, the View should be derived from the Model. But that's not always the case since sometimes how we present things to a screen is not the best logical way to model things in our domain - not to mention, the domain should be presentation agnostic. This leads into Fowler's argument for a Presentation Model, which is a model that belongs to the Presentation.
I call this a Presentation Model because it's a model that is really
designed for and thus part of the presentation layer.
Microsoft took that idea and ran with it in a variant of MVC called MVVM (Model View ViewModel).
You can read more about that in Microsoft's documentation on ASP.Net Core.
So, back to your original question of "Should you pass the model directly to the view?" If you are using MVC then the controller is what provides the interaction. But if you're really asking, "Can you bind your view directly to the model?" If your model has all the stuff you need organized how your view needs it, then sure. And if it's simple enough, maybe that's the way to go. Otherwise, you could go with something like a Presentation Model or MVVM.
While using a custom MVC framework I found that the view can actually access data in the model. That was a bit of a surprise because I always thought the V must go through the C. It was something like
//this is completely made up but not far off
serverside foreach(var v in Model.GetSomeList()) {
<div>#v.name</div>
}
Do many MVC frameworks in any programming language allow the view to access anything in the model? When do i choose what should go through the controller and what is ok to access from the view?
Usually that "Model" is really like viewmodel, not the business layer Model object, although it could be the POCO version of the business object. Basically, the view is bound to some poco without any business logic.
Information flow in classical MVC.
Data in MVC should not go from model through controller to view. That is violation of the original concept.
If you read the original definition of MVC design pattern you will notice that Views are meant to request the data from Model. And views know when to do it, because they are observing Model for changes.
Modern interpretations.
In the original concept you were meant to have small MVC triad for each element in the application. In modern interpretation (as per Martin Fowler), the model is not anymore any single object or class. Model is a layer, which contains several groups of objects. Each with a different set of responsibilities.
Also, with the rise of Web there was another problem. You cannot use classical MVC for websites. Theoretically now you could achieve it by keeping an open socket and pushing a notification to the browser every time you changed something in the model layer.
But in practice even a site with 100 concurrent users will start having problems. And you would not use MVC for making just a blog. Using such an approach for even minor social network would be impossible.
And that was not the only divergence from the original concept.
MVC-inspired patterns
Currently, along with classical MVC (which is not even all so classical anymore). There are three major MVC inspired patterns:
Model2 MVC
This is basically same classical MVC patter, but there is not observer relationship between model later and view(s). This pattern is meant to me more web-oriented. Each time you receive a user request, you know that something is gonna change in model layer. Therefore each user request cause view instance to request information from the model layer.
MVP
This pattern, instead replaces controller with a presenter. The presenter request data from model layer and passes it to current view. You can find patterns definition here. It is actually a lot more complex, and I, honestly, do not fully understand it.
In this case the View is passive and will not request any data from model layer.
MVVM
This pattern is closer to MVP hen to classical MVC. In this case the controller-like structure (which actually would be more then a monolith class) request data from model layer and then alters it in such a way as it is expected by the (passive) view.
This pattern is mostly aimed at situation where developer does not have full controller over views or/and model layer. For example, when you are developing some application where model layer is SAP. Or when you have to work with an existing frontend infrastructure.
FYI: what is called "MVVM" in ASP.NET MVC is actually a good Model2 implementation .. what they call "viewmodels" are actually view instances and "views" are just templates that are used by views.
This is common. If you look at the Wikipedia page for MVC, this is what it says for the view:
A view requests from the model the information that it needs to generate an output representation.
MVC is an architectural style, so some people change it as they see fit. From the design intentions of the architecture this particular question is certainly not frowned upon.
I've mulled over Design Patterns for some time now and I am just starting to see how I might actually begin incorporating some of these more deliberately in my development work. However, I am still confused about their treatment of MVC in the beginning of the book and how it relates to the rest of the book.
Most of the frameworks I have worked with - Spring, Yii, ASP.NET, and even Objective-C Cocoa (UIKit) - cater to the MVC paradigm. I get MVC because to me it is a useful way of classifying objects and how they should message or interact with each other. Plus, these frameworks kind of force it upon you even if you are not setting out to think in the MVC way.
I also feel that I understand the premise of Design Patterns: they really don't like subclassing, they love abstract interfaces, and they strive for loose coupling. I can't say I fully understand all of the patterns yet or how they are useful, but I am getting a feel for it.
My question is this: what is the interplay between MVC and design patterns? What were they getting at in the first chapter of the book with the MVC application example? Are certain design patterns just not relevant in the MVC paradigm? I wonder, for example, how the Command pattern is supposed to fit into MVC. It seems incredibly useful, but do we create a CommandModel and CommandController to send to other controllers? Do we just create a Command object as prescribed in the book? Basically, I am wondering if the ideas of MVC and Design Patterns are wholly disjoint and I just don't understand, or if there are some patterns that do not fit into the mold.
My personnal opinion is that MVC is a simplified version of the Observer Pattern which is a simplified version of the Mediator Pattern.
MVC: One Model, One view, the Controler manages the communication between them.
Observer Pattern: One Model, Multiples views ( observers/subscribers ), and the publisher manages the communication
Mediator Pattern: Several different Models, Several views, and the mediator manages the communications between them.
The MVC in the GoF book is for the desktop, it uses the observer pattern to update views. The command example in the GoF book is for an editor.
There are other flavors of MVC where the use of other design patterns may not be obvious:
What is the difference between MVC and MVVM?
Presentation abstraction control
The GoF book says:
...
Taken at face value, this example reflects a design that decouples views from models. But the design is applicable to a more general problem: decoupling objects so that changes to one can affect any number of others without requiring the changed object to know details of the others. This more general design is described by the Observer (page 293) design pattern.
Another feature of MVC is that views can be nested. For example, a control panel of buttons might be implemented as a complex view containing nested button views. The user interface for an object inspector can consist of nested views that may be reused in a debugger. MVC supports nested views with the CompositeView class, a subclass of View. CompositeView objects act just like View objects; a composite view can be used wherever a view can be used, but it also contains and manages nested views.
Again, we could think of this as a design that lets us treat a composite view just like we treat one of its components. But the design is applicable to a more general problem, which occurs whenever we want to group objects and treat the group like an individual object. This more general design is described by the Composite (163) design pattern. It lets you create a class hierarchy in which some subclasses define primitive objects (e.g., Button) and other classes define composite objects (CompositeView) that assemble the primitives into more complex objects.
MVC also lets you change the way a view responds to user input without changing its visual presentation. You might want to change the way it responds to the keyboard, for example, or have it use a pop-up menu instead of command keys. MVC encapsulates the response mechanism in a Controller object. There is a class hierarchy of controllers, making it easy to create a new controller as a variation on an existing one.
A view uses an instance of a Controller subclass to implement a particular response strategy; to implement a different strategy, simply replace the instance with a different kind of controller. It's even possible to change a view's controller at run-time to let the view change the way it responds to user input. For example, a view can be disabled so that it doesn't accept input simply by giving it a controller that ignores input events.
The View-Controller relationship is an example of the Strategy (315) design pattern. A Strategy is an object that represents an algorithm. It's useful when you want to replace the algorithm either statically or dynamically, when you have a lot of variants of the algorithm, or when the algorithm has complex data structures that you want to encapsulate.
MVC uses other design patterns, such as Factory Method (107) to specify the default controller class for a view and Decorator (175) to add scrolling to a view. But the main relationships in MVC are given by the Observer, Composite, and Strategy design patterns.
...
MVC is a pattern. But it only covers a small aspect of a web application. Another common pattern that gets used with MVC is the Repository. These are more architectural patterns.... their scope has a bigger impact on the overall project.
the GOF patterns will introduce themselves in little ways all over the place. They can help build MVC infrastructure depending on design choices. eg, Strategy gets used a lot so you can plug in different ways of doing things like "authentication" etc.
You don't have to use the patterns as they are, they don't even have to be the exact same code structure. Its more the design principle / goal of the pattern that you employ in the design.
MVC is an architectural pattern. It perfectly fits with other design patterns like Command Pattern. But you do not apply patterns just because they exist and they are written in an authoritative book. You apply patterns when you have a programming/design problem and there is a way to solve that problem that was discovered by someone else and was written down. The way to solve a problem is a pattern. For example, you have an application that saves data to the database. Data to be saved is quite complex: some records must be inserted, some records updated and some deleted. The sequence of steps is important because the records to be inserted into one table depend on records to be inserted into another table. So, a database transaction must be used. One of possible ways to implement the transaction is to use Command Pattern. The way to do it is very well explained in Larman's "Applying UML and Patterns" book (chapter "Designing a Persistence Framework wth Patterns", section "Designing a Transaction with the Command Pattern" - scroll down to the page 556). PersistentObject is an abstract Model class there. All other Model classes extend it. In that example MVC is implemented in the UI, Application and Domain layers but Command is implemented in the Persistence layer. These patterns help to solve different problems and they are mutually supportive in that example.
I am contemplating about using an MVC pattern in my new project and I can clearly see the main advantage of being able to put the data layer (the model) a little closer to the presentation layer (the view), which will allow a little increase in application speed. But apart from performance stand point are there any other advantages of MVC over the view-logic-data layered type pattern?
EDIT:
For those who's interested I just uploaded a sample PHP code that I created to test the use of MVC. I purposly omitted all the security checks to make the code a little easier to read. Please don't critisize it too much, because I know it could be a lot more refined and advanced, but nevertheless - it works!!! I will welcome questions and suggestions: Here is the link: http://www.sourcecodester.com/sites/default/files/download/techexpert/test_mvc.zip
The separation of concerns that's quoted as being an advantage of MVC is actually also an advance of a 3-layer/3-tier system. There too, the business logic is independent and can be used from different presentation tiers.
A main difference is that in classic MVC the model can have a reference back to the view. This means when data is updated the model can push this data back to possibly multiple views. The prime example is a desktop application where data is visualized in multiple ways. This can be as simple as a table and graph. A change in the table (which is a change in one view) is first pushed via the controller to the model, which then pushes it back to the graph (the other view). The graph then updates itself.
Since desktop development is on the decline, a lot of programmers have only come in touch with MVC in some web variant, e.g. via JSF in Java EE.
In those cases the model almost never has a reference to the view. This is because the web is mainly request/response based and after a request has been served, the server cannot send additional information. I.e. an update pushed from the model to the client would be meaningless. With reverse ajax/comet this is changing, but many web based MVC frameworks still don't fully utilize this.
Thus, in the case of web based MVC, the typical "triangle" between M, V and C is less there and that MVC variant is actually closer to an n-tier model than 'true' MVC is.
Also note that some web MVC frameworks have an intermediate plumbing part between M, V and C called a backing bean (Java/JSF) or code behind (ASP.NET). In JSF the controller is provided by the framework, and the view often doesn't bind directly to the model but uses this backing bean as an intermediary. The backing bean is very slim and basically just pre-fetches data from the model one way and translates model specific messages (e.g. exceptions) into view specific messages (e.g. some human readable text).
Beside
code reuse,
separating of concerns,
less coupling between the layers,
already mentioned by #bakoyaro and #arjan
i think that MVC is better than 3-tier when combined with the "convention over configuration" pattern. (i.e. "ruby on rails" or Microsofts "MVC for asp.net").
In my opinion this combination leads to to better and easier code maintanance.
In the first place it makes learning the mvc-framework a bit more difficuilt since you have to learn the conventions (a la controllers go into the controllers folder and must be named xxxxxcontroller)
But after you learned the conventions it is easier to maintain your own and foreign code.
Forget increasing application speed by moving to MVC. I have found the biggest benefit to be ease of code reuse. Once you move to MVC, there are no dependencies on the presentation of your data or the storage of the actual data.
For example you could write a servlet that served up .jsp pages as your presentation layer one day, and the next day write a web service as another presentation layer to your existing Model and Controller. Like wise if you want or need to switch your DBMS. Since accessing the Model is completely separate from everything else, you would just need to re-write just your data access objects to return the data in a way your Controller can handle it.
By separating concerns into 3 distinct pieces, you also facilitate true unit testing. Your Presentation layer can be tested free of the Model or Controller, and vice-a-versa.
On a side note, I've often felt that the MVC abbreviation was inaccurate. Whenever I see it I think of it as View->Controller->Model. The presentation layer will never have DAO code in it, and the model will never have presentation logic in it. The Controller is forced to act as a go-between.
Where 3-tier separates presentation from business and data access, MVC is a presentation layer pattern which further separates Model (data) from View (screen) and Controller (input).
There is no choosing MVC over 3-tier/3-layered. Use them both.
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I've heard the term MVC (Model View Controller) tossed about with a ton of Buzz lately, but what really is it?
You might want to take a look at what Martin Fowler has to say about MVC, MVP and UI architectures in general at Martin Fowlers site.
I like this article by Martin Fowler. You'll see that MVC is actually more or less dead, strictly speaking, in its original domain of rich UI programming. The distinction between View and Controller doesn't apply to most modern UI toolkits.
The term seems to have found new life in web programming circles recently. I'm not sure whether that's truly MVC though, or just re-using the name for some closely related but subtly different ideas.
MVC is a design pattern originally pioneered in the olden days of smalltalk.
The concept was that a model would represent your application state and logic, and controllers would handle IO between "Views".
A View was a representation of the state in the model. For example, your model may be a spreadsheet document, and you may have a view that represents it as a spreadsheet and a view that represents it as a pivot table.
Modern MVC has been polluted with fake MVC web junk, so I'll let others answer that.
Here is a naive description of MVC : http://www.devcodenote.com/2015/04/mvc-model-view-controller.html
A snippet:
Definition : It is a design pattern which separates an application into multiple layers of functionality.
The layers:
Model
Represents data.
It acts as an interface between the database and the application (as a data object).
It will handle validations, associations, transactions etc.
Controller
It gathers and processes data.
Handles code which does data selection and data messaging.
View
Displays output to the users.
MVC Design Pattern:
4 parts = User, View, Controller, Model.
User:
- sees the View and uses the Controller.
Model:
- holds the data and updates the Model that there is new data/state.
View:
- displays the data that the Model has.
Controller:
- takes the request from the user to get or set information, then communicates with either the View or Model, resp.
- it "gets" via the View.
- it "sets" via the Model.
As the tag on your question states its a design pattern. But that probably doesn't help you. Basically what it is, is a way to organize your code into logical groupings that keep the various pieces separate and easily modifiable.
Simplification:
Model = Data structure / Business Logic
View = Output layer (i.e HTML code)
Controller = Message transfer layer
So when people talk about MVC what they are talking about is dividing up there code into these logical groups to keep it clean and structured, and hopefully loosely coupled. By following this design pattern you should be able to build applications that could have there View completely changed into something else without ever having to touch your controller or model (i.e. switching from HTML to RSS).
There are tons and tons of tutorials out there just google for it and I'm sure you'll turn up at least one that will explain it in terms that click with you.
Wikipedia seems to describe it best so far:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller
Model-view-controller (MVC) is an architectural pattern used in software engineering. Successful use of the pattern isolates business logic from user interface considerations, resulting in an application where it is easier to modify either the visual appearance of the application or the underlying business rules without affecting the other. In MVC, the model represents the information (the data) of the application and the business rules used to manipulate the data; the view corresponds to elements of the user interface such as text, checkbox items, and so forth; and the controller manages details involving the communication to the model of user actions such as keystrokes and mouse movements
The MVC or Model-View-Controller User Interface Paradigm was first described by Trygve Reenskaug of the Xerox PARC. In first appeared in print in Byte magazine volume 6, number 8, in August of 1981.
This What is MVC blog article on Oreilly has you covered.
MVC is a software architecture pattern that separates representation from user interaction.
Generally, the model consists of application data and functions that interact with it, while the view presents this data to the user; the controller mediates between the two.
It is a way of separating the underlying functionality of your application (model) from the way it interacts with the user (view). The controller coordinates how the model and view talk to each other.
Whilst it is all the rage at the moment, it is important to remember that preventing the model itself being able to determine exactly how its data is presented to the user can seen as a negative thing. The most obvious example is with HTML. The original intention of HTML was that there should be a clear separation of the model (HTML) from the view (rendered webpage) via a controller (the browser). There has been such a backlash against this original intention that browsers are criticised if they do not render a page pixel perfect to the designer's desired view.
MVC is a way to partition a user interface element into 3 distinct concepts. The model is the data on which the interface operates. The view is how the element is represented visually (or maybe audibly?). The controller is the logic that operates on the data.
For example, if you have some text you want to manipulate in a UI. A simple string could represent the data. The view could be a text field. The controller is the logic that translates input from the user - say character or mouse input - and makes changes to the underlying data model.
Like many have said already, MVC is a design pattern. I'm teaching one of my coworkers now and have explained it this way:
Models - The data access layer. This can be direct data access, web services, etc
Views - The presentation layer of your application.
Controllers - This is the business logic for your application.
This pattern enhances test-driven development.