Our new web application development is now well and truly underway and the team has decided to give some
insight into the way the development team are approaching the application. We've decided on taking the
Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach to the application design. For those of you that haven't designed using
this pattern before I'll give you a very brief run down. In MVC, the model represents
the information (the data) of the application and the business rules used to manipulate the data; the view
corresponds to elements of the UI such as the controls; and the controller
manages details involving the communication to the model of user actions.
The team have been making use of the brand new ASP.Net MVC framework from Microsoft. The framework is completely
different to the standard web forms ASP.Net implementation that we are used to, but believe that the MVC approach
is a great and in some ways superior alternative. With the separation of the business logic from user interface
(UI) considerations, Microsoft have been able to design the MVC framework to be very Test-Driven-Development
friendly (something that was a struggle with web forms) - and unit testing is something we can't live without
anymore in this team! Other features include intuitive URLs within the application (à la ReST) and the welcome
addition of the bundled jQuery library.
Microsoft we salute you!
