The same but different

Allegedly Martin Fowler is working for some time on a second volume of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

One group of patterns he is writing about is Presentation Patterns. Here you can find the usual suspects like:

• Model-View-Controller (MVC)
• Model-View-Presenter (MVP)
• Presentation Model

Its my experience that when you read the according papers for the first time, all those 'different but still similar' patterns can get quite confusing...

A co-worker of me once said that this is like the different revolutionary groups in Life of Brian:

• The Judean People's Front
• The People's Front of Judea
• The Popular Front of Judea

They all look the same, they all have the same purpose, sometimes they are even the same people ... but the difference is still more important than everything else!

Jeremy Miller now has set out to get rid of the confusion for good. He is writing a very instructive series of blog posts:

1. Preamble
2. The Humble Dialog Box
3. Supervising Controller
4. Passive View
5. Presentation Model
6. View to Presenter Communication
7. Answering some questions
8. What's the Model?
9. Assigning Responsibilities in a Model View Presenter Architecture

The series is still ongoing, but I got already a lot of insights. If Jeremy continues like this, Martin is going to have a hard time to sell his book...

The post "What's the Model?" was especially interesting for me. I have already had tons of discussions about the pros and cons of using the Domain Model in the UI. Jeremy now lists objectively the different options, and shows that there is not one best solution. So this is an inherent problem, and its not me and my insufficient level of enlightenment...