Tutorial Examples and Model View Controller (MVC) Design

I'm sure many of you are familiar with Model-View-Controller (MVC) design. If you aren't, the purpose of MVC design is to separate the data and logic from the GUI, or the display, of an application. In fact, Arjan has written an article on this very subject: A Generic MVC Model in Java if you would like more information.

For program design, this just makes good sense.

However, Arjan points out that we don't use MVC design in our tutorial examples. He has taken SliderDemo3 and re-designed it using MVC architecture. He illustrates the point of MVC design by extending the GUI of the example without affecting the rest of the code. It's nicely done.

I posted some commentary about his example in the slider-demo-3 thread. I won't repeat the whole entry here, but this is one of those trade offs we look at when working on the tutorial. To create tutorial examples with perfect design principles, we would have to bloat examples that are designed to illustrate a specific piece of information. Sometimes, we just don't want to do that.

However, I do think there is room for more sophisticated "real world" examples and we haven't addressed that need as well as we might. It's an issue I don't see being resolved in the near future, with resources being what they are.

This is why the Java Community Portal is a needed resource. People like Arjan can share and leverage this sort of information.

To follow (or contribute to) the discussion, check out the slider-demo-3 thread.

-- Sharon Zakhour

Posted at 08:06PM May 08, 2008 by The Java Tutorial Team  |  Comments[0]