What are MVP and MVC and what is the difference

Question

When looking beyond the RAD  drag-drop and configure  way of building user interfaces that many tools encourage you are likely to come across three design patterns called Model-View-Controller  Model-View-Presenter and Model-View-ViewModel  My question has three parts to it    What issues do these patterns address  How are they similar  How are they different

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This is an oversimplification of the many variants of these design patterns  but this is how I like to think about the differences between the two   MVC    MVP

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I blogged about this a while back  quoting on Todd Snyder s excellent post on the difference between the two      Here are the key differences between   the patterns       MVP Pattern         View is more loosely coupled to the model  The presenter is   responsible for binding the model to   the view    Easier to unit test because interaction with the view is through   an interface   Usually view to presenter map one to one  Complex views may have   multi presenters          MVC Pattern         Controller are based on behaviors and can be shared across   views   Can be responsible for determining which view to display      It is the best explanation on the web I could find

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I think this image by Erwin Vandervalk  and the accompanying article  is the best explanation of MVC  MVP  and MVVM  their similarities  and their differences  The article does not show up in search engine results for queries on  MVC  MVP  and MVVM  because the title of the article does not contain the words  MVC  and  MVP   but it is the best explanation  I think       The article also matches what Uncle Bob Martin said in his one of his talks  that MVC was originally designed for the small UI components  not for the architecture of the system

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Model-View-Presenter In MVP  the Presenter contains the UI business logic for the View  All invocations from the View delegate directly to the Presenter  The Presenter is also decoupled directly from the View and talks to it through an interface  This is to allow mocking of the View in a unit test  One common attribute of MVP is that there has to be a lot of two-way dispatching  For example  when someone clicks the  quot Save quot  button  the event handler delegates to the Presenter s  quot OnSave quot  method  Once the save is completed  the Presenter will then call back the View through its interface so that the View can display that the save has completed  MVP tends to be a very natural pattern for achieving separated presentation in WebForms  The reason is that the View is always created first by the ASP NET runtime  You can find out more about both variants  Two primary variations Passive View  The View is as dumb as possible and contains almost zero logic  A Presenter is a middle man that talks to the View and the Model  The View and Model are completely shielded from one another  The Model may raise events  but the Presenter subscribes to them for updating the View  In Passive View there is no direct data binding  instead  the View exposes setter properties that the Presenter uses to set the data  All state is managed in the Presenter and not the View   Pro  maximum testability surface  clean separation of the View and Model Con  more work  for example all the setter properties  as you are doing all the data binding yourself   Supervising Controller  The Presenter handles user gestures  The View binds to the Model directly through data binding  In this case  it s the Presenter s job to pass off the Model to the View so that it can bind to it  The Presenter will also contain logic for gestures like pressing a button  navigation  etc   Pro  by leveraging data binding the amount of code is reduced  Con  there s a less testable surface  because of data binding   and there s less encapsulation in the View since it talks directly to the Model   Model-View-Controller In the MVC  the Controller is responsible for determining which View to display in response to any action including when the application loads  This differs from MVP where actions route through the View to the Presenter  In MVC  every action in the View correlates with a call to a Controller along with an action  In the web  each action involves a call to a URL on the other side of which there is a Controller who responds  Once that Controller has completed its processing  it will return the correct View  The sequence continues in that manner throughout the life of the application       Action in the View         -  Call to Controller         -  Controller Logic         -  Controller returns the View   One other big difference about MVC is that the View does not directly bind to the Model  The view simply renders and is completely stateless  In implementations of MVC  the View usually will not have any logic in the code behind  This is contrary to MVP where it is absolutely necessary because  if the View does not delegate to the Presenter  it will never get called  Presentation Model One other pattern to look at is the Presentation Model pattern  In this pattern  there is no Presenter  Instead  the View binds directly to a Presentation Model  The Presentation Model is a Model crafted specifically for the View  This means this Model can expose properties that one would never put on a domain model as it would be a violation of separation-of-concerns  In this case  the Presentation Model binds to the domain model and may subscribe to events coming from that Model  The View then subscribes to events coming from the Presentation Model and updates itself accordingly  The Presentation Model can expose commands which the view uses for invoking actions  The advantage of this approach is that you can essentially remove the code-behind altogether as the PM completely encapsulates all of the behavior for the view  This pattern is a very strong candidate for use in WPF applications and is also called Model-View-ViewModel  There is a MSDN article about the Presentation Model and a section in the Composite Application Guidance for WPF  former Prism  about Separated Presentation Patterns

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They each addresses different problems and can even be combined together to have something like below    There is also a complete comparison of MVC  MVP and MVVM here

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Both of these frameworks aim to seperate concerns - for instance  interaction with a data source  model   application logic  or turning this data into useful information   Controller Presenter  and display code  View    In some cases the model can also be used to turn a data source into a higher level abstraction as well   A good example of this is the MVC Storefront project   There is a discussion here regarding the differences between MVC vs MVP   The distinction made is that in an MVC application traditionally has the view and the controller interact with the model  but not with each other   MVP designs have the Presenter access the model and interact with the view   Having said that  ASP NET MVC is by these definitions an MVP framework because the Controller accesses the Model to populate the View which is meant to have no logic  just  displays the variables provided by the Controller    To perhaps get an idea of the ASP NET MVC distinction from MVP  check out this MIX presentation by Scott Hanselman

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MVP is not necessarily a scenario where the View is in charge  see Taligent s MVP for example   I find it unfortunate that people are still preaching this as a pattern  View in charge  as opposed to an anti-pattern as it contradicts  It s just a view   Pragmatic Programmer    It s just a view  states that the final view shown to the user is a secondary concern of the application  Microsoft s MVP pattern renders re-use of Views much more difficult and conveniently excuses Microsoft s designer from encouraging bad practice   To be perfectly frank  I think the underlying concerns of MVC hold true for any MVP implementation and the differences are almost entirely semantic  As long as you are following separation of concerns between the view  that displays the data   the controller  that initialises and controls user interaction  and the model  the underlying data and or services   then you are achieving the benefits of MVC  If you are achieving the benefits then who really cares whether your pattern is MVC  MVP or Supervising Controller  The only real pattern remains as MVC  the rest are just differing flavours of it   Consider this highly exciting article that comprehensively lists a number of these differing implementations   You may note that they re all basically doing the same thing but slightly differently   I personally think MVP has only been recently re-introduced as a catchy term to either reduce arguments between semantic bigots who argue whether something is truly MVC or not or to justify Microsofts Rapid Application Development tools  Neither of these reasons in my books justify its existence as a separate design pattern

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I have used both MVP and MVC and although we as developers tend to focus on the technical differences of both patterns the point for MVP in IMHO is much more related to ease of adoption than anything else    If I   m working in a team that already as a good background on web forms development style it   s far easier to introduce MVP than MVC  I would say that MVP in this scenario is a quick win    My experience tells me that moving  a team from web forms to MVP and then from MVP to MVC is relatively easy  moving from web forms to MVC is more difficult   I leave here a link to a series of articles a friend of mine has published about MVP and MVC   http   www qsoft be post Building-the-MVP-StoreFront-Gutthrie-style aspx

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MVP  the view is in charge  The view  in most cases  creates its presenter  The presenter will interact with the model and manipulate the view through an interface  The view will sometimes interact with the presenter  usually through some interface   This comes down to implementation  do you want the view to call methods on the presenter or do you want the view to have events the presenter listens to  It boils down to this  The view knows about the presenter  The view delegates to the presenter  MVC  the controller is in charge  The controller is created or accessed based on some event request  The controller then creates the appropriate view and interacts with the model to further configure the view  It boils down to  the controller creates and manages the view  the view is slave to the controller  The view does not know about the controller

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The simplest answer is how the view interacts with the model  In MVP the view is updated by the presenter  which acts as as intermediary between the view and the model  The presenter takes the input from the view  which retrieves the data from the model and then performs any business logic required and then updates the view  In MVC the model updates the view directly rather than going back through the controller

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In a few words   In MVC  View has the UI part  which calls the controller which in turn calls the model  amp  model in turn fires events back to view  In MVP  View contains UI and calls the presenter for implementation part  The presenter calls the view directly for updates to the UI part  Model which contains business logic is called by the presenter and no interaction whatsoever with the view  So here presenter does most of the work

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There are many answers to the question  but I felt there is a need for some really simple answer clearly comparing the two  Here s the discussion I made up when a user searches for a movie name in an MVP and MVC app   User  Click click      View  Who   s that   MVP MVC   User  I just clicked on the search button      View  Ok  hold on a sec        MVP MVC     View calling the Presenter Controller        MVP MVC   View  Hey Presenter Controller  a User has just clicked on the search button  what shall I do   MVP MVC   Presenter Controller  Hey View  is there any search term on that page   MVP MVC   View  Yes     here it is        piano     MVP MVC   Presenter  Thanks View     meanwhile I   m looking up the search term on the Model  please show him her a progress bar  MVP MVC     Presenter Controller is calling the Model        MVP MVC   Presenter Controller  Hey Model  Do you have any match for this search term      piano     MVP MVC   Model  Hey Presenter Controller  let me check      MVP MVC     Model is making a query to the movie database        MVP MVC     After a while        -------------- This is where MVP and MVC start to diverge ---------------  Model  I found a list for you  Presenter  here it is in JSON       name   Piano Teacher   year  2001    name   Piano   year  1993       MVP   Model  There is some result available  Controller  I have created a field variable in my instance and filled it with the result  It s name is  searchResultsList   MVC    Presenter Controller thanks Model and gets back to the View   MVP MVC   Presenter  Thanks for waiting View  I found a list of matching results for you and arranged them in a presentable format    Piano Teacher 2001   Piano 1993    Please show it to the user in a vertical list  Also please hide the progress bar now  MVP   Controller  Thanks for waiting View  I have asked Model about your search query  It says it has found a list of matching results and stored them in a variable named  searchResultsList  inside its instance  You can get it from there  Also please hide the progress bar now  MVC   View  Thank you very much Presenter  MVP   View  Thank you  Controller   MVC   Now the View is questioning itself  How should I present the results I get from the Model to the user  Should the production year of the movie come first or last     Should it be in a vertical or horizontal list         In case you re interested  I have been writing a series of articles dealing with app architectural patterns  MVC  MVP  MVVP  clean architecture       accompanied by a Github repo here  Even though the sample is written for android  the underlying principles can be applied to any medium

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In MVP the view draws data from the presenter which draws and prepares normalizes data from the model while in MVC the controller draws data from the model and set  by push in the view   In MVP you can have a single view working with multiple types of presenters and a single presenter working with different multiple views   MVP usually uses some sort of a binding framework  such as Microsoft WPF binding framework or various binding frameworks for HTML5 and Java    In those frameworks  the UI HTML5 XAML  is aware of what property of the presenter each UI element displays  so when you bind a view to a presenter  the view looks for the properties and knows how to draw data from them and how to set them when a value is changed in the UI by the user   So  if for example  the model is a car  then the presenter is some sort of a car presenter  exposes the car properties  year  maker  seats  etc   to the view  The view knows that the text field called  car maker  needs to display the presenter Maker property    You can then bind to the view many different types of presenter  all must have Maker property - it can be of a plane  train or what ever   the view doesn t care  The view draws data from the presenter - no matter which - as long as it implements an agreed interface   This binding framework  if you strip it down  it s actually the controller  -    And so  you can look on MVP as an evolution of MVC    MVC is great  but the problem is that usually its controller per view  Controller A knows how to set fields of View A  If now  you want View A to display data of model B  you need Controller A to know model B  or you need Controller A to receive an object with an interface - which is like MVP only without the bindings  or you need to rewrite the UI set code in Controller B   Conclusion - MVP and MVC are both decouple of UI patterns  but MVP usually uses a bindings framework which is MVC underneath  THUS MVP is at a higher architectural level than MVC and a wrapper pattern above of MVC

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You forgot about Action-Domain-Responder  ADR    As explained in some graphics above  there s a direct relation link between the Model and the View in MVC  An action is performed on the Controller  which will execute an action on the Model  That action in the Model  will trigger a reaction in the View  The View  is always updated when the Model s state changes   Some people keep forgetting  that MVC was created in the late 70   and that the Web was only created in late 80  early 90   MVC wasn t originally created for the Web  but for Desktop applications instead  where the Controller  Model and View would co-exist together   Because we use web frameworks  eg   Laravel  that still use the same naming conventions  model-view-controller   we tend to think that it must be MVC  but it s actually something else   Instead  have a look at Action-Domain-Responder  In ADR  the Controller gets an Action  which will perform an operation in the Model Domain  So far  the same  The difference is  it then collects that operation s response data  and pass it to a Responder  eg   view    for rendering  When a new action is requested on the same component  the Controller is called again  and the cycle repeats itself  In ADR  there s no connection between the Model Domain and the View  Reponser s response    Note  Wikipedia states that  Each ADR action  however  is represented by separate classes or closures    This is not necessarily true  Several Actions can be in the same Controller  and the pattern is still the same   mvc adr model-view-controller action-domain-responder

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Here are illustrations which represent communication flow

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There are many versions of MVC  this answer is about the original MVC in Smalltalk  In brief  it is   This talk droidcon NYC 2017 - Clean app design with Architecture Components clarifies it

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My humble short view  MVP is for large scales  and MVC for tiny scales  With MVC  I sometime feel the V and the C may be seen a two sides of a single indivisible component rather directly bound to M  and one inevitably falls to this when going down-to shorter scales  like UI controls and base widgets  At this level of granularity  MVP makes little sense  When one on the contrary go to larger scales  proper interface becomes more important  the same with unambiguous assignment of responsibilities  and here comes MVP   On the other hand  this scale rule of a thumb  may weight very little when the platform characteristics favours some kind of relations between the components  like with the web  where it seems to be easier to implement MVC  more than MVP

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MVP   Model-View-Presenter MVC   Model-View-Controller   Both presentation patterns   They separate the dependencies between a Model  think Domain objects   your screen web page  the View   and how your UI is supposed to behave  Presenter Controller  They are fairly similar in concept  folks initialize the Presenter Controller differently depending on taste  A great article on the differences is here   Most notable is that MVC pattern has the Model updating the View

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MVP  MVP stands for Model - View- Presenter  This came to a picture in early 2007 where Microsoft introduced Smart Client windows applications    A presenter is acting as a supervisory role in MVP which binding View events and business logic from models   View event binding will be implemented in the Presenter from a view interface    The view is the initiator for user inputs and then delegates the events to the Presenter and the presenter handles event bindings and gets data from models   Pros      The view is having only  UI not any logics     High level of testability   Cons      Bit complex and more work when implementing event bindings  MVC  MVC stands for Model-View-Controller  Controller is responsible for creating models and rendering views with binding models    Controller is the initiator and it decides which view to render    Pros    Emphasis on Single Responsibility Principle   High level of testability   Cons    Sometimes too much workload for Controllers  if try to render multiple views in same controller

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Model-View-Controller  MVC is a pattern for the architecture of a software application  It separate the application logic into three separate parts  promoting modularity and ease of collaboration and reuse  It also makes applications more flexible and welcoming to iterations It separates an application into the following components    Models for handling data and business logic Controllers for handling the user interface and application Views for handling graphical user interface objects and presentation   To make this a little more clear  let s imagine a simple shopping list app  All we want is a list of the name  quantity and price of each item we need to buy this week  Below we ll describe how we could implement some of this functionality using MVC     Model-View-Presenter   The model is the data that will be displayed in the view  user interface   The view is an interface that displays data  the model  and routes user commands  events  to the Presenter to act upon that data  The view usually has a reference to its Presenter  The Presenter is the    middle-man     played by the controller in MVC  and has references to both  view and model  Please note that the word    Model    is misleading  It should rather be business logic that retrieves or manipulates a Model  For instance  If you have a database storing User in a database table and your View wants to display a list of users  then the Presenter would have a reference to your database business logic  like a DAO  from where the Presenter will query a list of Users       If you want to see a sample with simple implementation please check   this GitHub post   A concrete workflow of querying and displaying a list of users from a database could work like this       What is the difference between MVC and MVP patterns    MVC Pattern   Controller are based on behaviors and can be shared across views Can be responsible for determining which view to display  Front Controller Pattern    MVP Pattern   View is more loosely coupled to the model  The presenter is responsible for binding the model to the view  Easier to unit test because interaction with the view is through an interface Usually view to presenter map one to one  Complex views may have multi presenters

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There is this nice video from Uncle Bob where he briefly explains MVC  amp  MVP at the end   IMO  MVP is an improved version of MVC where you basically separate the concern of what you re gonna show  the data  from how you re gonna show  the view   The presenter includes kinda the business logic of your UI  implicitly imposes what data should be presented and gives you a list of dumb view models  And when the time comes to show the data  you simply plug your view  probably includes the same id s  into your adapter and set the relevant view fields using those view models with a minimum amount of code being introduced  just using setters   Its main benefit is you can test your UI business logic against many various views like showing items in a horizontal list or vertical list     In MVC  we talk through interfaces  boundaries  to glue different layers  A controller is a plug-in to our architecture but it has no such a restriction to impose what to show  In that sense  MVP is kind of an MVC with a concept of views being pluggable to the controller over adapters    I hope this helps better

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Both are patterns trying to separate presentation and business logic  decoupling business logic from UI aspects  Architecturally  MVP is Page Controller based approach where MVC is Front Controller based approach   That means that in MVP standard web form page life cycle is just enhanced by extracting the business logic from code behind  In other words  page is the one servicing http request  In other words  MVP IMHO is web form evolutionary type of enhancement  MVC on other hand changes completely the game because the request gets intercepted by controller class before page is loaded  the business logic is executed there and then at the end result of controller processing the data just dumped to the page   view   In that sense  MVC looks  at least to me  a lot to Supervising Controller flavor of MVP enhanced with routing engine   Both of them enable TDD and have downsides and upsides    Decision on how to choose one of them IMHO should be based on how much time one invested in ASP NET web form type of web development   If one would consider himself good in web forms  I would suggest MVP   If one would feel not so comfortable in things such as page life cycle etc MVC could be a way to go here   Here s yet another blog post link giving a little bit more details on this topic   http   blog vuscode com malovicn archive 2007 12 18 model-view-presenter-mvp-vs-model-view-controller-mvc aspx

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Also worth remembering is that there are different types of MVPs as well  Fowler has broken the pattern into two - Passive View and Supervising Controller   When using Passive View  your View typically implement a fine-grained interface with properties mapping more or less directly to the underlaying UI widget  For instance  you might have a ICustomerView with properties like Name and Address   Your implementation might look something like this   public class CustomerView   ICustomerView       public string Name                get   return txtName Text            set   txtName Text   value              Your Presenter class will talk to the model and  map  it to the view  This approach is called the  Passive View   The benefit is that the view is easy to test  and it is easier to move between UI platforms  Web  Windows XAML  etc    The disadvantage is that you can t leverage things like databinding  which is really powerful in frameworks like WPF and Silverlight    The second flavor of MVP is the Supervising Controller  In that case your View might have a property called Customer  which then again is databound to the UI widgets  You don t have to think about synchronizing and micro-manage the view  and the Supervising Controller can step in and help when needed  for instance with compled interaction logic   The third  flavor  of MVP  or someone would perhaps call it a separate pattern  is the Presentation Model  or sometimes referred to Model-View-ViewModel   Compared to the MVP you  merge  the M and the P into one class  You have your customer object which your UI widgets is data bound to  but you also have additional UI-spesific fields like  IsButtonEnabled   or  IsReadOnly   etc   I think the best resource I ve found to UI architecture is the series of blog posts done by Jeremy Miller over at The Build Your Own CAB Series Table of Contents  He covered all the flavors of MVP and showed C  code to implement them   I have also blogged about the Model-View-ViewModel pattern in the context of Silverlight over at YouCard Re-visited  Implementing the ViewModel pattern

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MVC  Model View Controller   The input is directed at the Controller first  not the view  That input might be coming from a user interacting with a page  but it could also be from simply entering a specific url into a browser  In either case  its a Controller that is interfaced with to kick off some functionality  There is a many-to-one relationship between the Controller and the View  That   s because a single controller may select different views to be rendered based on the operation being executed  Note the one way arrow from Controller to View  This is because the View doesn   t have any knowledge of or reference to the controller  The Controller does pass back the Model  so there is knowledge between the View and the expected Model being passed into it  but not the Controller serving it up   MVP  Model View Presenter   The input begins with the View  not the Presenter  There is a one-to-one mapping between the View and the associated Presenter  The View holds a reference to the Presenter  The Presenter is also reacting to events being triggered from the View  so its aware of the View its associated with  The Presenter updates the View based on the requested actions it performs on the Model  but the View is not Model aware   For more Reference

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