Developing re-usable components based on the virtual-MVC design pattern

Abstract

In modern complex enterprise applications re-usability and interoperability of software components are of vital importance due to the increasing heterogeneous development platforms and variety of end user devices in which computational services need to be exposed. The need of code solutions re-usability led to the development of Design Patterns, which are means to encapsulate proven solutions to recurrent problems and they provide developers with a common language to abstract the logic encrypted under source code implementation structures. In this article we focus on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. Although it represented a step forward for components re-usability, the model and view are still coupled compromising the business logic and introducing a degree of complexity for the applications development. We discuss two main variations of the MVC pattern that are aiming to complete decoupling of Model from View, as well as platforms supporting the development of MVC based applications. Our research is based on the original Virtual-MVC design pattern, in which we model the controller as middleware to achieve full decoupling of the model from view. Our main contribution is to demonstrate the development process of re-usable components in the framework of the V-MVC pattern, through a development platform that supports Virtual-MVC based applications. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.