So, I've been working mostly on backend stuff not visible to the general public, and somewhere along the way I deleted day 6. Hope I didn't do anything important that day.

MVC sucks, or not

I'm still not sure if MVC is the 'best' way to write a web app. It still bugs me that I'm visiting at least 3 different files to get something done - the model, one or more view files, and the controller. The view thing, loading multiple views sucks in my opinion. Why break up a page into multiple chunks? Then keeping it clear in my head what $data i need to send to these views? I don't get the sense of that.

I got into CodeIgniter and MVC becuase I was looking for a better way to re-write an application that I am currently involved in. It's reasonably robust and is working very well for my customer, who is processing $20,000 a day in orders with it. But it has reached that 'manageability limit' where it's painful to respond to requests for changes.

On the other hand, the approach I took on that one was to leverage PHP class auto-loading, and in some respects it's sort of a MV app. Most things come from class files, which are auto-loaded on demand (none of this silly $load->library(stuff), which I really think is annoying in CodeIgniter). My 'views' are single and somewhat conventional PHP pages, exect that most content is loaded from classes, for example, PageHTML provides header, footer, lots of other stuff, so a page 'template' looks like:

echo PageHTML::header($title,$pagejavascript);

echo SomethingOrOther::stuff($parameters);

echo PageHTML::footer();

When i need new or modified functionality, I go to an existing class, or create a new one, and do what needs to be done.

In this little site it seems to me that MVC is just as prone to manageablilty and scalability problems as any other approach, I've already painted myself into a few corners on something this simple.

Anyway, I'll keep at it, lot's of things I haven't explored yet.