main purpose of using mvc

Question

Ive been doing a bit of research / reading into mvc recently and was just wondering what the main purpose is.

1. is it as some people say to seperate the logic from the html
2. or to create clean url's

i could be missing the point completely, but asp.net forms really seperates the logic from the html and if you just want clean url's why not use a mod_rewrite rule?

Answer 1

MVC is a software engineering concept which is used more widely than just in ASP.net.

In a nutshell it encourages strong separation of:

• business logic (the Model) the code which does all the brute force work behind the scenes; dealing with the database, performing large calculations; and
• user interface logic (the View) the code which presents information to your users in a pretty way.

The C is for Controller - the ligaments that bind the bones of the model and the muscles of the views and allow them to communicate with each other cleanly.

You are correct that 'normal' ASP.net uses code-behind files so that page markup is kept separate from the code that generates that markup (in contrast to languages like PHP where code is embedded directly amongst HTML), but MVC ASP.net encourages even more separation in the ways I described above.

Take a look at this tutorial for a more detailed discussion of the pattern. Also take a look at this SO question

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The MVC pattern has nothing to do with rewriting URLs. ASP.net MVC might make this easier but that is not by any means it's main purpose.