Model–view–controller

Model–View–Controller (MVC) is a software architectural pattern for implementing user interfaces on computers. It divides a given application into three interconnected parts in order to separate internal representations of information from the ways that information is presented to and accepted from the user. The MVC design pattern decouples these major components allowing for efficient code reuse and parallel development.

Traditionally used for desktop graphical user interfaces (GUIs), this architecture has become popular for designing web applications and even mobile, desktop and other clients. Popular programming languages like Java, C#, Ruby, PHP and others have popular MVC frameworks that are currently being used in web application development straight out of the box.

As with other software architectures, MVC expresses the "core of the solution" to a problem while allowing it to be adapted for each system. Particular MVC architectures can vary significantly from the traditional description here.

In addition to dividing the application into three kinds of components, the model–view–controller design defines the interactions between them.

One of the seminal insights in the early development of graphical user interfaces, MVC became one of the first approaches to describe and implement software constructs in terms of their responsibilities.

Trygve Reenskaug introduced MVC into Smalltalk-76 while visiting the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Jim Althoff and others implemented a version of MVC for the Smalltalk-80 class library. Only later did a 1988 article in The Journal of Object Technology (JOT) express MVC as a general concept.

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