[Catalyst] Move MVC Thoughts

[Andy Wardley]

Christopher H. Laco wrote:
> ASP.NET quicker than MVC? MVC is a burden? That can't be. The only thing 
> I can think of is that other MVC frameworks must really suck...

Sorry for the somewhat late reply, but you might be interested in a post I 
previously made to the TT list, entitled "MVC: No Silver Bullet".  There's
a copy of it here:

  http://wardley.org/computers/web/mvc.html

It's a few years old now, and the world has changed a bit since I wrote it
(i.e. we now have Catalyst, Maypole and others) but I think the underlying
points are still valid.

The essence of it is that "Separation of Concerns" is what is important not
MVC.  MVC happens to be one way of achieving SOC, but it's not the only way,
and it's often not the best way, especially if you're dealing with a strict
interpretation of MVC.  Furthermore, concetrating too closely on MVC and 
ignoring the larger SOC picture, can result in systems that give more pain
than gain - forcing you into a rigid framework that is conceptually elegant
but cumbersome to use in practice.

J2EE does adopt a strict interpretation of MVC.  Coupled with the fact that
Java itself is a very strict language that requires a lot of code to do very 
little (compared to dynamic languages like Perl, Ruby, Python, etc), then it's
hardly surprising that other WAFs are heralded as quicker and less cumbersome.

Ultimately, I'm not knocking MVC because it's certainly better than nothing.  
But MVC is not the final word(s) on WAFs, it's just a good place to start.

A