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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T23:39:38+00:00

I’ve been learning Zend and its MVC application structure for my new job, and

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I’ve been learning Zend and its MVC application structure for my new job, and found that working with it just bothered me for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then during the course of my studies I came across articles such as MVC: No Silver Bullet and this podcast on the topic of MVC and web applications. The guy in the podcast made a very good case against MVC as a web application architecture and nailed a lot of what was bugging me on the head.

However, the question remains, if MVC isn’t really a good fit for web applications, what is?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It all depends on your coding style. Here’s the secret: It is impossible to write classical MVC in PHP.

    Any framework which claims you can is lying to you. The reality is that frameworks themselves cannot even implement MVC — your code can. But that’s not as good a marketing pitch, I guess.

    To implement a classical MVC it would require for you to have persistent Models to begin with. Additionally, Model should inform View about the changes (observer pattern), which too is impossible in your vanilla PHP page (you can do something close to classical MVC, if you use sockets, but that’s impractical for real website).

    In web development you actually have 4 other MVC-inspired solutions:

    • Model2 MVC: View is requesting data from the Model and then deciding how to render it and which templates to use. Controller is responsible for changing the state of both View and Model.

    • MVVM: Controller is swapped out for a ViewModel, which is responsible for the translation between View’s expectations and Models’s logic. View requests data from controller, which translates the request so that Model can understand it.

      Most often you would use this when you have no control over either views or the model layer.

    • MVP (what php frameworks call “MVC”): Presenter requests information from Model, collects it, modifies it, and passes it to the passive View.

      To explore this pattern, I would recommend for you begin with this publication. It will explain it in detail.

    • HMVC (or PAC): differs from Model2 with ability of a controller to execute sub-controllers. Each with own triad of M, V and C. You gain modularity and maintainability, but pay with some hit in performance.

    Anyway. The bottom line is: you haven’t really used MVC.

    But if you are sick of all the MVC-like structures, you can look into:

    • event driven architectures
    • n-Tier architecture

    And then there is always the DCI paradigm, but it has some issues when applied to PHP (you cannot cast to a class in PHP .. not without ugly hacks).

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