What is the Model-View-Controller (MVC) Compound Design Pattern?
The MVC “compound” design pattern, or “framework”, or “architecture”, was originally developed by Professor Trygve Reenskaug at Xerox PARC in 1978. Its purpose at that time was to provide convenient GUI support in the programming language Smalltalk. Nowadays the MVC is widely used in various GUI contexts, and in particular in the design of Swing components in Java. (See Peter van der Linden’s Just Java, published by Prentice-Hall.) Here is the basic formulation of the MVC design pattern: • Name The name of the design pattern is Model-View-Controller. • Intent The intent of this design pattern is to help keep the user interface separate from the rest of the program. • Solution The MVC pattern solves this problem by dividing a program into three parts: • The Model, which contains the computational part of the program, i.e., which provides access to the system’s core functionality, the system’s state information, and a state change notification system. • The View, which presents the user’
