Question

I know that MVC is highly acclaimed for PHP applications, but I am not sure at all that it fits in JavaScript. If you think otherwise, then please explain how and where you handle common scenarios like AJAX requests, data saving (offline storage), presentation, how do you handle controller logic (do you have a front controller?), and so forth.

What about Model-View-Presentation?

I am using ExtJS and using the server only for permanent data storage.

Answer 1

If you’re planning on coding your UI purely with JavaScript, you could think your PHP end of things as more of a web service or an API.

Basically your View would be the Ext JS stuff you write in JS. To work with your data, the Ext frontend would perform requests to your “service”. Basically you would have a sort of model-controller architecture on your server, where the job of the controller would be to process requests and output JSON (for consumption by your Ext frontend)

Essentially, the “view” in your backend would simply be output from json_encode, which is then consumed by your actual Ext based view.

In JS, you can have controllers depending on what sort of stuff you’re doing. If you’re just displaying data from the server, you may not require much separate logic. If you’re doing some more complex processing, it may be useful to separate the code into a separate controller and view.

It’s mostly up to how much you want to separate the logic.