I was in that exact position a few years ago (crazy coincidence, innit?). After a few hours of wikistumbling through c2.com, I got considerably more confused. The next step I took was to chase down a copy of the first published description. Google wasn't my friend in this process* and I had to resort to the old-fashioned route of requesting a loan from some - the only one, in fact - college library that had the aug/1988 copy of the Journal of Object Oriented Programming. I only half-understood it because at the time I wasn't conversant in Smalltalk. But I undestood enough to see that MVC was somewhat different from what the Java guys talked about.
One big difference is that Smalltalk-80 was self-hosted - it was it's own operating system**. This meant that input device processing was a responsability of objects. And that, my little friends, is how the Controller came to be. Quoting the paper:
In particular, controllers coordinate the models and views with the input devices and handles scheduling tasks. (...) Class Controller does include default scheduling behaviour...What motivated me to write this entry was Fowler's superb article on GUI architectures. In there you'll find a thorough discussion on MVC and its subsequent variants. It will be a chapter on the upcoming second volume of his Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
* Of course, now the bastard is online here.
** This control obsession can be seen still today, just look at Squeak's UI and fondly remember the glorious Win3.1 days...
1 comment:
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