The Death Of MVC

For better or worse, MVC (Model-View-Controller) design is rapidly becoming "legacy". The reason this is happening is that MVC does not give the end-user what she really wants: RIA - a "rich internet application" experience. This is the experience she had in the "old" client-server days, implemented in IDEs such as Visual Basic, OracleForms, Borland Delphi, and so on.

What is rising to take its place is what I'll call "Web-VB": the features of Visual Basic (available since the 90's), but implemented in a web browser, as opposed to a client-server desktop.

Examples of implementation of this Web-VB are: Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and (yecch!) AJAX. These, like the original VB, are component-oriented (as opposed to "object oriented" and event-driven (driven by events, which are usually triggered by a browser user's mouse clicks and button pushes). This totally blows apart the old RESTful (aka request-response aka state-transition) MVC model.

I'm going to argue (mainly to support this article's title) that, contrary to popular opinion, Flex, Silverlight and AJAX are NOT truly MVC, in that the Controller does not "initiate the change requests", at least, not in any clearly defined and easily debuggable layer....

...and they are anything but RESTful. :-)