In a programmer’s mind

This relation is about to end by WolfS♡ul

Many web frameworks are structured around the MVC pattern for server web development. The relationship between the use of MVC and server web development is fatally doomed. Here is why.

MVC in itself is a wonderful pattern. In case you do not know about it, here is a quick snippet from your preferred source.

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; the view corresponds to elements of the user interface such as text, checkbox items, and so forth; and the controller manages the communication of data and the business rules used to manipulate the data to and from the model.

It is a pattern that has brought success to many software projects. It is popular and used in many places.

In the traditional sense of web development, it would look close to this:

In this case, the browser is treated as a view, the application server contains the controllers and the database or any other storage mean is treated as the model. The problem with this pattern is that it is getting further and further way from the real usage. What has changed is the browser. It is less of a simple viewer today than it used to be.

In case you have not noticed, the browser is the new operating system. It can store data, manipulate and process data in multiple ways and it can shows more rich data than before. The browser is not exclusively used to show simple linked and static pages anymore. It is running full blown applications. With the explosion of Javascript, you can expect this trend to keep growing.

This is what we are going towards for web development:

This does not eliminate the MVC pattern. It could still be used for the application running in the browser, but I think it will kill the most of the MVC server web development as we know it today.

In order to develop the application generator or provider, we will need better tools than what we have now. Maintaining a bunch of CSS, HTML, Javascript and server side code files is not realistic anymore if you want to scale, develop rapidly and have a pleasant developing experience.

This is where tools like Google Web Toolkits and Pyjamas. We need more of those tools.