Most web frameworks are still using the traditional action based MVC model. A controller recieves the request, calls the model and delegates rendering to a template. That is what Rails, Grails, Struts, Spring MVC … are doing.
The other category, the component based frameworks like Wicket, Tapestry, JSF, or ASP.Net Web Forms have become more popular over the last years, but my perception is that the traditional action based approach is far more popular. And even ASP .Net Web Forms has become a sibling name ASP .Net Web MVC. Edit: Maybe my perception was wrong because of the impression of increasing interest in Wicket. If I ask Google Trends, there is much more growth in the tradional MVC frameworks.
I think the kind of applications built with both types of frameworks is overlapping very much, so the question is: Why are action based frameworks so predominant?
[Citation Needed]?
I seriously doubt this claim. MVC has taken over the .Net blog/twitter sphere. Its really hard to find somebody saying “we’ll use webforms for our next project”.
MVC fits the stateless nature of the web better. Component frameworks are an abstraction web developers didn’t want.