In the past few years, there has been a significant change in the domain of web development. Nowadays, deployment of a web project is much beyond uploading static CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files to an HTTP server. JavaScript single-handedly cannot be used to provide a stable foundation for complex and large scale web applications. Maintainable and quality codes needed to be written. This problem has been resolved with the introduction of MVC framework, which provides a structured guidance to develop various web applications.
What is MVC Framework?
The Model-View-Controller or MVC framework is basically a library, which can be included along with JavaScript for providing an abstraction layer apart from the coding language. It is an architectural pattern, which divides an application into three major logical components – a) the model, b) the view, and c) the controller. Each of these components has been built so that specific application aspect development can be properly handled. Most of the website development professionals use this industry-standard framework for creating extensible and scalable projects.
MVC Components Overview
- Model- This component of the framework communicates to all the data/information related logic that you work with. This component can represent any data related to business logic or information that gets transferred between the controller and the view components. For instance, the customer object in this component would retrieve from the database, the customer information and after manipulating, would update it wither to render data or send it back to the database.
- View- This is used for all the User Interface logic of the application. For instance, the customer view includes all the User Interface components like dropdowns, text boxes, and so on, which enables the final user to interact with.
- Controller- This component functions as an interface between the View and Model components, where all the incoming requests and business logic are processed, manipulating the data (using model) and interacting with the view, in order to render the final output. For instance, the customer controller component handles all the inputs and interactions from the View and updates the database using the Model. The same controller can be used to view the Customer data.
Why do you need MVC framework?
Web page building becomes easier if a DOM manipulation library like jQuery or JavaScript is coupled with utility libraries like modernizer /underscore. However, when these libraries are implemented to build web applications, they lose their utilities. Unlike normal web pages, web applications need more user interaction and communication with a real time backend server. If the developer tries to handle this behavior without the MVC framework then the whole thing would completely become messy, un-testable, unmaintainable, and unstructured code.
An MVC framework is utilized when an application with heavy-lifting with JavaScript only on the client-side is built. MVC framework is also used when the web application needs asynchronous connection with the backend or the application comes with some functionality that should under no way result in a full page reload, like infinite scrolling or adding a comment to a post.
