Home Page : Glossary : "M" : MVC

MVC

MVC

Model View Controller. A design architecture for interactive applications that divides an application into three layers:

Model. The model represents the business data and logic that goes with that data.
View. The view provides the public interface to the model, for example the GUI. The View provides a means of displaying portions of the business data provided by the model.
Controller. The controller defines the application behaviour. The controller manages events that affect the model or view.

A partial summary of MVC is that in an application the model is the data, the view is the user interface and the controller is the logic and glue between the two.

MVC was originally developed to map the traditional input, processing and output roles of command line applications into a corresponding model that could be applied to GUI applications. So whereas the traditional model was:

Input → Processing → Output

these map to:

Controller → Model → View

although it must be stressed that the inter-relationships between the model, view and controller are more complex that this simple comparison would suggest, and is normally represented as:

controller	→	View
		↓
	→	Model

controller	→ ←	View
		↑↓
	→	Model

Relevant links:

http://java.sun.com/blueprints/guidelines/designing_enterprise_applications_2e/app-arch/app-arch2.html - Excellent overview of the MVC architecture.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ModelViewController
www.enode.com/x/markup/tutorial/mvc.html

Can you add to this definition? If so please Report an Observation. Do you know of a relevant link to add under this definition? If so please Add a Link.