Justification for MVC?

Question

Hi guys,

I was wondering if someone could provide me with some answers. I've been asking to swap our internal apps to an MVC architecture for quite a while now. Rails was absolutely shot-down as a toy, Struts is just too huge for the apps we do, Django's name makes these old folks nervous (oil & gas industry) but finally, finally Microsoft has come out with MVC 1.0.

Since the Powers that Be are dead-set on using Microsoft technologies, I think I may be able to convince them to move our applications to an MVC pattern. Unfortunately, I can't come up with a good reason to swap to our forms-based structure to an MVC style.

Can anyone think of justification good enough to feed to my bosses? :-)

Answer 1

There are a number of questions that address this in different ways:

• Should I pursue ASP.NET WebForms or ASP.NET MVC
• How to decide which is right, WebForms or MVC when doing ASP.NET
• Traditional ASP .NET vs MVC
• Biggest advantage to using ASP.Net MVC vs web forms
• MVC Versus Web Forms
• ASP.NET vs ASP.NET MVC

Answer 2

Do you have a good reason to switch? It sounds like you don't so I am wondering if you are switching for the sake of MVC itself which I would discourage you from doing.

ASP.NET MVC is helpful when you wish to have more control over the output and lifecyle of your application. Keep in mind that in many cases this means more work for you as the developer. MVC frameworks are good for sites that are not data-entry intensive - in other words if you handle a lot of form POSTs and process data out of those forms then ASP.NET MVC will actually create more work for you.

I don't mean to sound harsh but it seem strange to me that you want to switch to ASP.NET MVC but don't really know why.

Answer 3

I think that in this case the OP is looking for a pragmatic (profitable) reason to switch over to MVC, since most companies think that way.

The biggest advantage is that it is much easier to create unit tests for ASP.NET MVC applications. A good suite of unit tests can then serve as the foundation of a Continuous Integration process.

The bottomline for the powers to be is that you can create a build in a single step, simplifying deployment, creating installers, patches etc.

Answer 4

Rails and Django both follow the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern so sounds like you will just be creating a load of work for yourself. Why do YOU want to switch to ASP.NET MVC?

Answer 5

I think it's not a matter of "selling" MVC, but rather of understanding it's advantages. also, you should seriously evaluate whether migrating an existing system to MVC will be cost effective. however, MVC has many advantages - here are some from the top of my head:

• separating control, data and presentation makes your application more maintainable
  • easier to make changes
  • after a relatively short learning curve, easier for other programmers to comprehend
• better design means introducing new features is easier. try adding caching, form validation, etc when everything is mixed up...
• an MVC system may be more testable (and therefor can be more reliable) - it's much easier to test your controllers than to test a spaghetti of data, control and presentation code.

Answer 6

"Struts is just too huge for the apps we do"

In what way? Struts made even simple internal applications a breeze to develop in our company, once we had learned how it worked (which was quite quick). A few JSPs, a few Actions, backend database access done in JDBC via some simple DAOs, bundle it all up in a war with ant/maven and deploy. Done.

Answer 7

Also, fyi, keep Joel's advice in mind (Things You Should Never Do, Part I): avoid rewrite the code from scratch.