Ever heard of Django? ASP.NET? Most UI frameworks, including ASP.NET Core, Spring Boot (Java based framework), Ruby on Rails, and Django (Python) are all based on MVC.
Those are all stateless MVC over HTTP, which is a very different architecture from stateful MVC for long-lived UI. The latter was invented for Smalltalk by Trygve Reenskaug, and is far more relevant to front-end web.
Stateful MVC uses Publisher/Subscriber (or Observer) to keep Views and Controllers up-to-date with changing Models over time, which is irrelevant for stateless MVC over HTTP. Plus, in stateful MVC the View and Controller are often "pluggable," where a given Controller+Model may use a different View for displaying the same data differently (e.g. table vs. pie chart), or a given View+Model may use a different Controller for handling events differently (e.g. mouse+keyboard vs. game controller). Whereas, in stateless MVC over HTTP, the controller is the "owner" of the process, and won't generally be replaced.
And in the world of front-end web, stateful MVC really is mostly dead. MVVM and Component-based architectures (using the Composite pattern) have replaced it. A runtime is usually responsible for wiring up events, rather than individual controllers. Controllers don't need to be swappable because events can be given semantic meaning in components, and Views don't need to be swappable because you can instead render a sub-composite to change how the data is shown.
Is the Controller not in a coupled pair with a View? We could imagine an interface where it could be completely separate (e.g. a kiosk TUI where stuff like "press 'r' for X" is displayed), but in the vast majority of UIs the View has state, and the Controller has to depend on that state (e.g. did this keypress happen with a text field focused). Sure, this is abstracted away via the UI framework and we operate on usually some form of event system.
But even then, I don't really see how we could have a non-coupled controller-view. In fact, I seem to remember that it was described in a similar way for Smalltalk even.
Whether application state is short-lived (e.g., request/response CRUD) or long-lived (e.g., an in-memory interactive UI) is orthogonal to MVC. MVC is a structural separation of responsibilities between model, view, and control logic. The duration of state affects implementation strategy, not the applicability of the pattern itself.
Kerrick|15 days ago
Stateful MVC uses Publisher/Subscriber (or Observer) to keep Views and Controllers up-to-date with changing Models over time, which is irrelevant for stateless MVC over HTTP. Plus, in stateful MVC the View and Controller are often "pluggable," where a given Controller+Model may use a different View for displaying the same data differently (e.g. table vs. pie chart), or a given View+Model may use a different Controller for handling events differently (e.g. mouse+keyboard vs. game controller). Whereas, in stateless MVC over HTTP, the controller is the "owner" of the process, and won't generally be replaced.
And in the world of front-end web, stateful MVC really is mostly dead. MVVM and Component-based architectures (using the Composite pattern) have replaced it. A runtime is usually responsible for wiring up events, rather than individual controllers. Controllers don't need to be swappable because events can be given semantic meaning in components, and Views don't need to be swappable because you can instead render a sub-composite to change how the data is shown.
gf000|14 days ago
But even then, I don't really see how we could have a non-coupled controller-view. In fact, I seem to remember that it was described in a similar way for Smalltalk even.
lateforwork|15 days ago