April 11, 2012

The point of MVC

Most frameworks use some form of MVC design pattern as do many other GUI development APIs. The point of the design pattern is to help support development by adding structure that simplifies the development of models independent of views and increase the simplicity of developing multiple views using the same data models.

An important aspect of using a design pattern like this is, naturally, also an increased ability to separate work among team members so that there is an increased ability to work together without coordination. Software development in the "real worls" is often a large group activity and needs structure that simplifies coordination.  

Another very important factor of the MVC pattern and other design principles in more large scale development that one may not immediately consider is the the ability to support automated testing by separating function from views. The ability to write test software for key functions like the data extraction and also the generation of views enables software development projects to utilize unit testing systems. Views and user interfaces get in the way of the test process so isolating those parts is good from a test perspective.

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