[thelist] Help me think in MVC

[Joe Crawford]

Hey Evolters:

I discovered the Model-View-Controller pattern earlier this year.
Well, not discovered, I had read about it in OO programming articles
years ago. And it's been around for decades. But this year I think I'm
finally getting it.

I think the reason I never got it was because I'd never encountered a
system that used it very well, or forced you to use it. Everything
I've worked on so far I now understand as very procedural, even in my
C++ and Java classes things the OO part of it was not really
emphasized more than you're forced to for those languages.

Only some web apps I've worked on use objects, but mostly code with
lots of functions in a global namespace. Lots of hokey validation
everywhere, lots and lots of duplications to do things like CRUD and
client-side validation. Now that I'm working with CakePHP (and
previous dabbling with Ruby on Rails and much older experience with
FuseBox and FuseBox II) I feel like I'm beginning to "get" it - like
it's in my head. I particularly have enjoyed using JavaScript in a
hyper-OO way. Though I understand now that JavaScript is OO without
the classes, making it sort of fundamentally wierd and different.

That said, I think what I'm ready for is some kind of "in the wild"
book about OO programming and MVC, something that has some good
background as to *why* MVC works how it does. Maybe not a book, but
maybe essays? I feel like what I'm looking for is a  articles with the
theme "Thinking in MVC."

Being so fresh to it I really have a hard time discriminating good
writing about MVC vs. bad writing. I can't tell a difference between
what's dogma and what's really useful, especially where to not be so
OO, and deciding where to create new classes and when not to.

Any and all suggestions for my intellectual stimulation are welcome.

Joe
-- 
http://joecrawford.com/
805-857-3951