MVC, or Model-View-Controller, is an architectural pattern used in software development. Although it’s been around for several decades, it has gained popularity recently as the crux of rapid development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, Monorail, and JavaScript MVC.

The aim of MVC is to promote good programming practices and code reuse by separating a web application into three layers: data, presentation, and the interaction between the two. By separating these elements from each other, one can be easily updated without affecting the others.

Having a good understanding of MVC will be extremely helpful for anyone who is interested in learning a web framework like the ones mentioned above. Many frameworks are built around Ruby on Rails’s implementation of MVC, so understanding the core concepts well makes learning other similar MVC frameworks much easier.

To understand MVC, we will look at each layer in some detail. Throughout this article, I will use the classic example of a blog to show how the concepts of MVC work in a real application. In short, the model represents the data. The view represents the user interface (the web page), and the controller facilitates communication between the two.