When I first came across the term MVC (Model-View-Controller) few years back, the whole concept sounded so complex, especially for people with (old) ASP and PHP background. In those days, we were so used to mixing business logics inside the presentation layer. It was so logical and convenient, until the code got big and things got out of hand. We forgot where the codes were, and we risked stability even for small changes to the UI, because they were all intertwined with business logics.
Typical PHP-HTML mixed code:
<?php
include "someFileContainsFunction.php";
public function someLocalFunction( $param )
{
return "Business logic in <b>$param</b>!";
}
?>
<html>
<title>HTML with PHP</title>
<body>
<h1>My Example</h1>
<?php
print someLocalFunction( "Inside body" );
?>
<b>Here is some more HTML</b>
<?php
print functionFromExternalPHP();
?>
</body>
</html>
Then I was introduced to MVC during a Microsoft .NET bootcamp in Singapore. I was quite fascinated with the idea. Separating the 3 components enable us to distribute the work to programmers and designers, allowable them to do their work without touching the fields they’re not familiar with. It is also an ideal solution to multinational collaboration.
Although the .NET MVC framework was great as a development tool, I couldn’t understand the fundamentals of building an MVC. We merely followed the coding style requirements by the framework, and work our way through to make the application work.
So I went in search of other languages, and found many other frameworks such as Ruby on Rails (for Ruby) and CakePHP (for PHP). They are also great MVC frameworks, but then again, they’re very established with quite stringent coding style requirements that I always got lost halfway down the development.
http://www.netmagazine.com/features/choose-right-php-framework
I thought the best way to learn about something is to start from the beginning, and keep on testing and failing until I understand it. The following 2 tutorials are great starting points. I managed to write my own MVC framework within a day (or maybe a few hours) by following the tutorial from Domagoj Salopek. I would recommend going through this tutorial first before going to the next one, which is slightly more complex but covers a little more for MVC.
http://www.domagojsalopek.com/Details/Create-a-simple-PHP-MVC-Framework/28
http://johnsquibb.com/tutorials
Of course, there’re people who think that using MVC on a small project is an overkill. Trust me, it’ll help you in the long run. By writing a core MVC framework, you’ll be able to use it in all other projects in the future, regardless how big or small it is. Unless the client only wanted a “simple” website. I know clients always think their requirements are simple because they don’t understand the simpler it seems, the more work it takes. I’m referring to those instances where the project can be done just with HTML and JavaScript. In those cases, MVC is really too much.
Now, going back to fiddling the simple MVC framework that I have written.
Edited: After writing my own simple MVC framework, I went on to study other major PHP framework such as Symfony, CakePHP and CodeIgniter. I noticed that CodeIgniter uses a very similar approach to the simple framework introduced by Domagoj. So if you’re advancing to a more complex framework, take a look at CodeIgniter. You’ll be glad he had written something so fundamental to get us started.
