Comments on: The Web is RMR not MVC

By: Andrew Davey

Andrew Davey — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:44:36 +0000

I think the danger of MVC is that unless you explicitly use it as Alan does you default into an RPC design. (ending up with “URIs” like /customer/1/delete .. shudder!)

I’m working on building a layer on top of ASP.NET MVC that brings a much more REST-focused approach.

There’s a screencast showing the library in action here:
http://www.aboutcode.net/2008/11/26/New+ResourceOriented+Library+For+ASPNET+MVC.aspx

By: Paul James

Paul James — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:47:21 +0000

Alan, partly this is just a question of naming, but then a difference in naming can lead to a difference in thinking.

As Ian points out above, it is more about binding actions to resources (models) rather than to controllers and of removing (or limiting) the need for routing. You say “The Controller is there to bind the system to HTTP”, but I feel that there should be no need for any binding as long as we work with HTTP to begin with rather than forcing our ways upon it.

By: Alan Dean

Alan Dean — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 10:00:07 +0000

Ian,

To answer your question, the Model determines state changes. The Controller is there to bind the system to HTTP. The Model is transfer-protocol agnostic (in practical terms, the Model should not address HttpContext).

By: Ian Davis

Ian Davis — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 20:03:39 +0000

Alan, interesting that your controllers have methods like Get and not your resources. Which component determines which methods are applicable to which resources? If I PUT a new representation to a resource URI what determines whether it changes the state of a resource or not?

By: Ian Davis

Ian Davis — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:59:14 +0000

Hi Jonathan. Paul says Resource is like Model but not identical. There’s a different division of responsibilities between the components of RMR and MVC. They both do the job but I find RMR-like frameworks interfere less with what I’m trying to do.

By: Alan Dean

Alan Dean — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:17:13 +0000

Isn’t this just a question of naming?

I [M]odel by resource, render representations with [V]iews and my [C]ontrollers have canonical method names like Post(), Put(), Get(), ContentNegotiate(), …

By: Jonathan Rochkind

Jonathan Rochkind — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:15:56 +0000

I must confess I don’t understand the paradigm shift. Maybe I just have a more liberal conception of “MVC” than most people. But to me, RMR just sounds like another name for MVC. Resource = Model, Method = Controller, Representation = View. Even in that short essay by James, he says that! “So the representation is like a view in MVC”, “This acts like an MVC controller”.

So what’s the big deal? What am I missing? How is this so different than calling it MVC still, how does this mean that MVC is poorly matched to the web? I’ve never ‘gotten’ it.