[thelist] MVC, Frameworks, and the big picture

Dave Land land at aol.com
Fri Aug 1 22:51:07 CDT 2008


On Jul 27, 2008, at 6:27 PM, Jeremy Weiss wrote:

> I've spent a good deal of my weekend continuing to learn more about  
> the MVC pattern and looking at some of the PHP frameworks that are  
> out there trying to find one to stick with. But there's some things  
> I'm still unsure of, so I thought I'd throw it out on The List to  
> see what all the resident experts have to say.


I've been doing a bit of this too, lately, in the Java/JSP realm. One  
thing I've noticed is that practically all "MVC-clean" frameworks are  
"controller-first": the request centers on a particular "action" that  
the user wants to perform, such as making a blog post, reporting a  
post as offensive, sending a private message and so forth.

We're currently using WebWork-based platform and problems arise (which  
one of our coders termed "action collisions") when our UI developers  
try to use methods from one action in another -- say, to display a  
list of recent blog entries as a "cross-sell" on a page whose action  
is focused on displaying a table of forums.

I've come across the Lift framework (http://liftweb.net/) lately,  
which describes itself as "View-first". It seems to match the way our  
developers think: "I'm displaying a page of forums, but I want to show  
a list of recent blog entries, too."

Have others come across this distinction (between "Controller-first"  
and "View-first" paradigms) and have any advice (or even just  
opinions) for me as I think about recommendations for future platform  
development?

Dave




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