Are server-assisted MVC frameworks peaking?

Question

I've been developing web apps for over a decade now, all the way from CGI to ASP.Net and Struts+Spring+Hibernate. The prevalent architectural style seems to be server-assisted MVC, e.g. Struts, Ruby on Rails, etc. Recent developments lead me to ask if these are on the decline.

• Adobe's AIR and Flex
• Microsoft's WPF and Silverlight
• Google's Chrome and Gears
• SOFEA and SOUI

All of this leads me to believe that we're starting to come full-circle after a 15-year distraction kicked-off by the invention of the web. Over this period of time, we've been so fascinated by all the web has to offer that we didn't notice that the usability (and the developer experience) of web apps pretty much sucked in comparison to desktop apps. It seems we're now saying "Screw this! We love the web's benefits but we also want better usability, offline capabilities, and better integration with the desktop!".

All of the above mentioned developments seem to be moving us in this direction of putting the presentation logic back where it used to be: the client. Don't get me wrong, I don't think server-assisted MVC frameworks are going away anytime soon, but I do think they are on the decline and RIAs and RDAs are on the rise.

So, what do you think? Are server-assisted MVC frameworks near their peak?

Answer 1

I agree, to a point - we are becoming are more client-centric, but I think this is because the clients are actually advancing in a standardized way.

We started out with everything on the client - because thats all there was. Then it was client-server, which separated the two, then gradually the client bit was thinned out and pushed back to the server, for one reason:

clients sucked (win95, macos<10, unix X11), and deployment was a nightmare. Deploying a browser was trivial.

Thats changing tho. Air is an easy install, as is .NET 3.5. Air apps are easy to deploy (click here - say yes!) as is a WPF Click-once app. The network is now a defacto part of the environment, not something special that had to be added. A database is something you can embed into a silverlight app (SQL Server Compact Edition), or an iphone (SqLite), not something you have to have a big server for.

and everything has auto-updating, which makes the post-install story a lot better.

I dont think they are on the decline - I think the logic has just been pushed out again, and it'll be pulled back in the future, only to be pushed back out etc.

Silverlight/Air/Flash etc are all very powerful, but HTML + Javascript, which is the basis of the server MVC frameworks, has come forward massively, esp if you ignore the b'stard that is IE6.

Regardless, I'll still be writing the backend for RIA's in a server-assisted MVC framework, even if they are throwing out JSON, not HTML. So while they are no longer the be-all, they are far from dead (or peaking)

Answer 2

Lets clarify something!

1. MVC is only a design pattern for the seperation of concerns. There is no really relation to server side frameworks.
2. There is no technical Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 ... JavaScript and Flash were there for years. It's only about social networking, tagging etc.

The server side frameworks are not dead at all. I agree with Nic Wise in case of the bad client architectures/rendering. Can you print a HTML page (every time in the same way)? No, you can't, because every browser(-engine) has it's own representation your HTML description. Only because JavaScript/Flash... are restrictions for a lot of people/companies, the server side processing will stay there for a long time.

Developing "Run anywhere" JavaScript has been a burden for a long time! Nowadays we have Frameworks like JQuery which do this job for you. I've written my own homepage in JavaScript, using EJS (Embedded JavaScript) for the templates/mvc. The old bloated JSP/PHP pages have shown, that differing the business logic from the design is a really good thing.

A bad problem of every web application is to decide, where you save the state of the application! If you choose a bad way, you are not able to scale. Client centric frameworks with service oriented backends allow you to scale very good.

I have been working a little bit with SOFEA/SOUI. If you have an ready framework stack for the most common problems, you'll love it.

Air and Flex are nice, but they bring in a lot of restrictions (Flash/JS...). Google's Chrome and Gears need you to install Google software at your computer. Who has Gears around here? Gears hasn't established as a wide distributed standard.

If you have experience with Hibernate/Spring and Struts, you sould try Grails! It is nice to develop GWT/FLEX&AIR/SOFEA&SOUI backends and also for the good old server side HTML rendering.

I like SOFEA/SOUI because it isn't such invasive, it offers an investment protection (SOA services) and high rate of reusability. It's also a nice way to move the load from your server to the clients.