MVC as a Hot Paradigm

Question

The Stack Overflow guys themselves on the Podcast mention how MVC is the new hot thing; .Net (presumably 4.0 will have it standard), Rails, & Django.

But I want to know what is the big deal.

It reminds me of asp/jsp from 2000 - interspersing lots of Request and Response commands with HTML.

And I don't see why actually writing SQL in SQL Server or MySQL is that painful, nor do I understand the benefits of ORM, LINQ, and so forth.

For me, the most complicated thing has never been retrieving, entering, managing, or creating data, but using AJAX to an extent of really making a rich front-end.

Can someone enlighten me as to why MVC is so hot and preferable to .Net 3.0 where the majority of my code and time is spent not in data management, but it front-end work?

Jonathan

Answer 1

Today apps are becoming more and more complex (both from business logic & UI logic perspective). These tools and patterns help deal with this complexity (which is effectively what Software Development is about): they help manage essential complexity without introducing a large amount of accidental complexity.

Answer 2

From here:

Successful use of the pattern isolates business logic from user interface considerations, resulting in an application where it is easier to modify either the visual appearance of the application or the underlying business rules without affecting the other.

Classic ASP.NET web development is highly coupled, wich makes very difficult to modify anything in isolation and to easily apply any automatic testing methodology. With MVC you can really apply principles like DRY and techniques like TDD.