Keith Devens .com

MVC architecture for web applications

I'm now at the point where my CMS is almost done and usable on my site. I've created a system that mostly encourages/enforces MVC. However, there are a few places that aren't quite as flexible as I'd like. I'm using my weblog system, of course, as a testbed application. If my CMS can't do my weblog system easily and make it better in the process, then it's a failure.

However, some things seem to be easier when you do everything ad hoc. Consider my main weblog page, my archive page, and my yearly summary page (hey look at that, I now have an archive for 2003... happy new year!). They all come from the same script, and it's done without much structure (logic, presentation, etc. are mixed). When you try to impose structure on it, it's not as easy. What exactly constitutes the template part of it, what logic is there, and how does that get put together and served from the same URL in my new system?

So, at this point, now that I've done my own MVC system, but I still have a few conceptual problems to work out, I'm really interested to see what other people have done. On Slashdot there's a review of Struts Kick Start, so I'm poring over some links from that. Phrame, which I looked at a while ago, is a port of Struts to PHP, and I'm going to look at that again. I'm about to print out this article from IBM developerWorks on using Tea (a Java-based templating language) as the "view" end of an MVC architecture.

What else? I guess that's it for now. I'm going to have to start looking at how other CMSs handle these things. I'll probably look at Zope a bit (which incidentally just released an early alpha of Zope3). If anyone has any pointers to share I'd be grateful.

I'm also reading Sun's Web-Tier Application Framework Design from Sun. It doesn't seem to be the model or the controller end that I'm having trouble with... those I seem to have done pretty well. It's mostly the "view" end that I have questions about.

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02:23 (utc-5)
edited: 20:51 (utc-5)