Tag Archives: programming

The next big thing, part 1: Resolving the conflict between Model-View-Controller and AJAX design patterns

or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the XMLHTTPRequest…

This is the first part of what will become an ongoing series.

If you’ve built a website in the last few years, most likely you’ve adopted an architecture similar to Model-View-Controller, or MVC. If not, well, either your website is terribly simple, you haven’t had to modify it yet, or your code is spaghetti and you should be fired. Just kidding. (Or maybe you’ve come up with an even better architecture, in which case you should share your insights with us mere mortals.)

In MVC architecture, the model reads and writes data to and from a back-end data-store, and organizes the relational data in a nice, hierarchical fashion to be used by the controller. The view accepts input from the controller and generates output HTML, XML, RSS, JavaScript, SVG, PDF, or whatever you want to send to the user’s browser. And the controller accepts browser input, figures out what to query the model for, and picks which view to use and what data to send it.

figure 1: The traditional MVC architecture.

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How to not hire a programmer

Here are some more snippets from pseudo-spam job offers. I’ll leave off the names to protect the incompetent.

We have a dedicated practice team which works on Web2.0 domain, open source technologies like AJAX, Perl, Ruby on Rails, Apollo and Silverlight.

Um, guys, AJAX is a marketing buzzword that refers to web-design practices, not any actual software. Neither Apollo nor Silverlight are open source. Perl and Ruby? Nothing about those languages are particularly Web 2.0. Good try, though, you managed to get seven buzzwords in one sentence.

Another email promised the opportunity to work on

a customized user interface using DOS and X-Windows on Linux

DOS on Linux. Sweet. Of course, I’m more of an PDP-11 on Mac OS X kinda guy.

And then there was this one:

Position: C++ Perl Unix Developer
Location: Sunnyvale, CA

Cool! I’ll just drive my Car Bicycle Train to Sunnyvale every day and happily work there in my Office Cubicle, sitting at my Desk Couch, working on my Computer Refrigerator, on their C++ Perl Unix project.