Differences between MVC and View First approach in web development

Question

Today when I searched on the internet I saw the View first approach in web development of Lift framework. Can somebody tell me the differences between view first and MVC approach ? Thank you very much

Tamarind

Answer 1

View first is based not on a model and a controller, but mostly interested in the view. Many problem domains do not neatly compose in controllers and models. Think about a ecommerce site, the shopping cart exists on all pages, but should every controller control it? Personally in MVC too much of my time is spent thinking about how to logically make the problem fit into MVC than just coding. View first takes away this controller / view / model and instead just has a view which in Lift can call "snippets". It is almost a superset of MVC since if you wanted you could only have a single snippet per page, but Lift allows you to do much more. Snippets can be cross cutting concerns or very page specfic logic.

From the lift website..

Lift is different [from MVC]. For HTML requests, Lift loads the view first and builds your page from the view. Lift also supports REST style requests for non-HTML data. (See 11 on page 1↑) “Why?” Because complex HTML pages rarely contain a dominant piece of logic... a single controller... but contain many different components. Some of those components interact and some do not. In Lift, you define the collection of components to be rendered in the resulting HTML page in the view.

Querida

Answer 2

When your using lift, you basically have a view(page) and from this you could incorporate any snippet(app) that you have without much of the antics you'd normally have to do in an MVC framework/environment.

Basically you don't have to choose what the most important thing on the page is just what you want to add to a page and then add it.

Grunberg