MVC is dead..... NOT

So I stumbled across this post on the twitterverse claiming that "MVC is dead". After a bit of hacker talk with Iordy, it was discovered there was already a heated discussion going on here. It seems even on the HN thread people get confused and start contradicting themselves.

The original article lost me pretty early on when it said "you end up stuffing too much code into your controllers, because you don't know where else to put it". If you're stuffing code in your controllers, then you're doing it wrong already.

The problem here stems from Rails programmers thinking the M in MVC is tightly coupled to your database table (via ActiveRecord). You can in fact have as many models as you want, not all of them have to be database tables, and in fact you can even inherit from existing models that are database tables if you wanted to.

To expand on that theory, the last few projects I've been a part of, we've sort of evolved into what I will call SMVC. We took the "database" side of things out of the model and put them into "schemes". Your scheme would do all the get/set work as well as serialize/de-serialize. The model could then inherit from the scheme and contain all the business logic but none of the "easy" serialization stuff.

Your controller in this case should not have any business logic. If you wanted to do certain things depending on request/environment, you could pass that info to the model via intialize and handle it in the model. Since you decoupled your scheme, you can easily add new accessors/mutators or just private instance variables that you can then use later, without affecting ActiveRecord in any way. Since you inherited from ActiveRecord you can overload any of the update/save methods you want and check your intial request/environment settings before calling super if you need to.

There is also not much need for fixtures if you are testing, since you still have access to the raw scheme, you can easily manage database data through these objects bypassing HTTP specific environments if you ever needed to.

Looking back to the original article above "MOVE", the SMVC example above is pretty much the same thing. It's just that the original article used the term "model" when referring to the serialization of data, probably because they thought that's just what models do. They simply "evolved" into the "MOVE" pattern because they were using MVC wrong in the first place. I.e. MVC is not dead, you're just doing it wrong, in fact, your new pattern is MVC renamed and ever so slightly abstracted.

Now we've focused on "too much logic in your controller", I'd like you to think about how much logic you have in your views. If it's way too much, I encourage you to check out MVVM.