Monday, December 17, 2007

MVC Framework - The bird’s eye view

During the weekend I came across Dino Esposito’s blog and found few interesting lines. Here it goes…
“It seems that the bar of software preview has been moved one more tick down. There was a time when any software was top secret until publicly released. Next, we assisted to pre-release announcements and demos. Next, we were allowed to play ourselves with beta versions for longer and longer times. And our feedback was first appreciated and then requested. Next, it was the season of CTPs, progressive alpha versions that precede the beta stage–the teen-age of software.With the MVC framework we reached the notable point of publicly discussing a piece of software that is not even a CTP. I wonder what would be the next step. Discussing ideas, I bet. And after that?”
It made me enough curious about MVC Framework May be not because I am very aggressive about new things but at least because you must be updated every minute in this industry or just get ready to die and that I don’t want…
There is not enough material available on this as it is in its infancy but I found some interesting things that I want to share with you…The first thing is the ScottGu’s presentation on this at Alt.Net.
See video. And next is ScottGu’s blog on the same. These two sources are native and apart from them I went across several blogs from the attendees of the Alt.Net presentation. I tried to assemble all the main content and some of my findings in this article and hope it might be helpful.
Starting with some issues…Being an ASP.Net developer I often run through a problem – How to write a unit test in a tightly coupled system. You may ask why to develop a tightly coupled application if I want to follow the test driven design. Then what I can do…I can use the MVC (Master view controller) pattern to develop my application. In fact ASP.Net itself supports the MVC by code behind model where you can say each aspx.vb class as a controller and aspx as a view. I will brief about the MVC as we will go a little further. For now I am stating another problem…ASP.Net is based on two primary things…Postback and Viewstate. And both of them have several problems associated with them. Trust me. Just do a googling on the phrase “Viewstate Problem” and you will find millions of entries.
So as the name suggests, MVC Framework is primarily based on and tried to remove the complexity of implementation of MVC design pattern. What is MVC pattern is all about?


Model-View-Controller (MVC) Pattern
The Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern separates the modeling of the domain, the presentation, and the actions based on user input into three separate classes.
Model. The model manages the behavior and data of the application domain, responds to requests for information about its state (usually from the view), and responds to instructions to change state (usually from the controller).
View. The view manages the display of information.
Controller. The controller interprets the mouse and keyboard inputs from the user, informing the model and/or the view to change as appropriate.


It is important to note that both the view and the controller depend on the model. However, the model depends on neither the view nor the controller. This is one the key benefits of the separation. This separation allows the model to be built and tested independent of the visual presentation. The separation between view and controller is secondary in many rich-client applications, and, in fact, many user interface frameworks implement the roles as one object. In Web applications, on the other hand, the separation between view (the browser) and controller (the server-side components handling the HTTP request) is very well defined.
Read More to learn how to implement MVC pattern.

Now, in ScottGu’s word some of the key points of MVC Framework:
It enables clean separation of concerns, testability, and TDD(Test Driven Design) by default. All core contracts within the MVC framework are interface based and easily mockable (it includes interface based IHttpRequest/IHttpResponse intrinsics). You can unit test the application without having to run the Controllers within an ASP.NET process (making unit testing fast). You can use any unit testing framework you want to-do this testing (including NUnit, MBUnit, MS Test, etc).

It is highly extensible and pluggable. Everything in the MVC framework is designed so that it can be easily replaced/customized (for example: you can optionally plug-in your own view engine, routing policy, parameter serialization, etc). It also supports using existing dependency injection and IOC container models (Windsor, Spring.Net, NHibernate, etc).

It includes a very powerful URL mapping component that enables you to build applications with clean URLs. URLs do not need to have extensions within them, and are designed to easily support SEO and REST-friendly naming patterns. For example, I could easily map the /products/edit/4 URL to the “Edit” action of the ProductsController class in my project above, or map the /Blogs/scottgu/10-10-2007/SomeTopic/ URL to a “DisplayPost” action of a BlogEngineController class.

The MVC framework supports using the existing ASP.NET .ASPX, .ASCX, and .Master markup files as “view templates” (meaning you can easily use existing ASP.NET features like nested master pages, <%= %> snippets, declarative server controls, templates, data-binding, localization, etc). It does not, however, use the existing post-back model for interactions back to the server. Instead, you’ll route all end-user interactions to a Controller class instead - which helps ensure clean separation of concerns and testability (it also means no viewstate or page lifecycle with MVC based views).

The ASP.NET MVC framework fully supports existing ASP.NET features like forms/windows authentication, URL authorization, membership/roles, output and data caching, session/profile state management, health monitoring, configuration system, the provider architecture, etc.

There are some good implementation examples available on this framework:
I guess, now you are much familiar with MVC framework, but this is the time to elaborate few of the points that ScottGu has pointed out in his blog. The first point is Dependency Injection. What is this??? Now a day the focus is on reusing existing components and wiring together disparate components to form a cohesive architecture. But this wiring can quickly become a scary task because as application size and complexity increase, so do dependencies. One way to mitigate the proliferation of dependencies is by using Dependency Injection (DI), which allows you to inject objects into a class, rather than relying on the class to create the object itself. Wanna go in detail? Wait for my next post in which I am planning to elaborate DI and Spring.Net and describe about limitations of Factory, Abstract Factory, Builder and Container.

The next thing that ScottGu has talked about is REST (Representational State Transfer)…
Well, REST is an architectural pattern that defines how network resources should be defined and addressed in order to gain shorter response times, clear separation of concerns between the front-end and back-end of a networked system. REST is based on three following principles:
  • An application expresses its state and implements its functionality by acting on logical resources.
  • Each resource is addressed using a specific URL syntax.
  • All addressable resources feature a contracted set of operations.
As you can see, the MVC Framework fulfills it entirely.

The MVC Framework doesn’t support classic postbacks and viewstate and doesn’t consider any URL as the endpoint to a physical server file to parse and compile to a class. In ASP.NET, you have a 1:1 correspondence between a URL and a resource. The only exception to this rule is when you use completely custom HTTP handlers bound to a particular path.

In the MVC Framework, a URL is seen as the mean to address a logical server resource, but not necessarily an ASPX file to parse. So the URLs employed by the pages of an MVC Framework application have a custom format that the application itself mandates. In the end, the MVC Framework employs a centralized HTTP handler that recognizes an application-specific syntax for links. In addition, each addressable resource exposes a well-known set of operations and a uniform interface for executing operations.

So here’s an alternate way of looking at the MVC Framework. It is an ASP.NET framework that performs data exchange by using a REST model versus the postback model of classic ASP.NET. Each page is split into two distinct components -controller and view - that operate over the same model of data. This is opposed to the classic code-behind model where no barrier is set that forces you to think in terms of separation of concerns and controllers and views. However, by keeping the code-behind class as thin as possible, and designing the business layer appropriately, a good developer could achieve separation of concerns even without adopting MVC and its overhead. MVC, however, is a model superior to a properly-done code-behind for its inherent support for test-driven development.