Andrzej on Software: Rails is not MVC

Andrzej on Software: Rails is not MVC

OK, so what's the difference?

In short, we're talking about MVC when a model can notify (through the Observer pattern) the views about the changes. It's not possible in a classical Rails app (it's possible when you use WebSockets, Pusher or a similar technology, but it's not so popular yet.). MVC was popular in desktop apps.

On the other hand, Model2 is exactly what we do with Rails. We don't notify the views from the model, the controller simply passes the model data to the views and handles the html generation which is then sent to the browser.

There's an interesting pattern evolving recently that a Rails app simply serves as a backend for a mobile app and all it does is exposing a JSON/REST API. It's similar to Model2, but instead of generating HTML it generates JSON. Still, it's not MVC.

You can read more about UI architectures in this article by Martin Fowler

Model 2 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia