At a certain point of my development as a PHP programmer, I was building MVC applications by-the-book, without understanding the ins-and-outs. I did what I was told: fat model, thin controller. Don’t put logic in your views. What I didn’t understand was how to create a cohesive application structure that allowed me to express my business ideas as maintainable code, nor did I understand how to really separate my concerns into tight layers without leaking low-level logic into higher layers. I’d heard about SOLID principles, but applying them to a web app was a mystery.
In this series, we’ll build a quiz application using these concepts. We’ll separate the application into layers, allowing us to substitute components: for example, it’ll be a breeze to switch from MongoDB to MySQL, or from a web interface to a command-line interface.
Why MVC Isn’t Enough:
MVC, which stands for Model-View-Controller, is a powerful design pattern for web applications. Unfortunately, with its rise to buzzword status, it has been taken out of context and used as a miracle cure. It’s become standard practice to use MVC frameworks, and many developers have succeeded in using them to seperate display logic and domain logic. The trouble is that developers stop there, building quasi-object-oriented systems at best and procedural code wrapped in classes–often controllers–at worst.
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