Piece of Cake!

Recently I was introduced to the MVC design pattern. I have been involved in object orientated design for some years and was vaguely aware of design patterns but never really understood how they could be applied. MVC is a fantastic example of just how useful design patterns can be.

MVC stands for Model, View, Controller. Essentially any web based system is arranged so that you have a set of methods and properties for handling data (the model), a set of methods and properties for handling application logic (the controller) and the view is concerned with output to the user.

Web applications using this approach are far more robust and flexible. It makes extending functionality a joy since each part of the application is not tightly bound to the other areas of the application. One such PHP based system is called Cake PHP which provides a ready made MVC web application framework which if used correctly radically improves code productivity, security and reliability.

Another widely used (perticularly on larger scale projects) is the Zend Framework

The learning curve for these development environments can be steep at first but well worth persevering with..