MVC

MVC

The term MVC stands for Model View Controller. It's history is long and varied and has been discussed widely on the interweb. The gist of it is that originally it was a specific type of separation of concerns for desktop application code. It was original invented by SmallTalk developers and then morphed into something else by Sun and then again by Next. Eventually it became standard practice for desktop frameworks to be built using some form of it. At some point some web developers took something kind of similar and started calling it MVC because it had something called a model, something called a view, and something called a controller, even though they didn't necessarily mean the same things or interact in the same ways as the desktop MVC conventions. There was a lot of debate for a while as to what should and shouldn't be called MVC. Eventually everyone just kept calling all of it MVC.

The stance of Zinc on this issue is that we don't care. Zinc developed zones (front controllers), templating systems (views), and the DbObject class (base class for standard models) before we knew that anyone was calling anything on the web MVC. This is the reason that we don't have base classes called Model, View, and Controller. We think that there is a reason why so many disparate web frameworks have converged on the same basic architecture. It's simple and it works. So Zinc could be considered and MVC or a Web MVC framework depending on your definitions for those terms. We just continue to try to do what works, you can call it what you want. We have continued using our old terminology but may reference models, views, and controllers in our docs from time to time to make things more clear for people already comfortable with that terminology.