There are frameworks which adopt the Model-View-Controller design pattern and they have been used extensively web development world, since they enable efficient incremental updates on the application’s state and visual layer.
With time though, once the application gets extended with additional functionality, the entire development process soon tends to become extremely arduous and error-prone. This led to the emergence of Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) and Web Component libraries which are able to achieve higher developer productivity, keeping the required source code minimal and well-organized.
Opinionated frameworks have accommodated application developers structure their code in a way that favors readability, consistency and maintainability by adopting well known design patterns, while at the same time assisting in avoiding common bad practices that ultimately lead to error-prone code.
These types of frameworks adopting the Model-View-Controller or MVC design patterns were considered the state-of-the-art for implementing fully fledged client-side web applications.
The application developer remains the sole entity responsible for manually specifying the logic that represents the state and the respective visual layer of the application. Additionally, with every change happening to the back-end services and as the user interaction going on with the application’s view, there were a few mutations typically needed to be propagated to the state and the visual layer of the application. Such type of change propagation was explicitly handled by the application developer employing imperative logic for every event causing such changes. This in return made the application development very laborious and error-prone, and the resultant applications are difficult to debug and maintain.
Disadvantages of MVC applications
Apart from the fact that the application developers follow this pattern and manage to create a seamless user experience, but at the same time incremental updates have to be performed manually by the application developer using imperative code. And in most cases, this results in writing multiple lines of boiler-plate code even for simple, non-complex tasks.
Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) Design Pattern
There are two main characteristics of the MVVM design pattern. The first being that it enforces a stricter ‘Separation of Concerns’, while at the same time it limits the size of the imperative code that is required for a web application. The building blocks of MVVM pattern contain: A Model, a View and a ViewModel. The last aspect or the ViewModel is an abstract representation of the View containing the JavaScript objects required by the respective component APIs that are responsible for the instantiation of the visual layer.
In recurrent MVVM frameworks, the mapping between the Model and the ViewModel occurs declaratively by the utilization of a template language which is introduced by the respective frameworks. Especially, by utilizing the template language the application developer binds a particular part of the Model to the respective part of the ViewModel and creates the premise which enables frameworks to automatically perform incremental maintenance of the application’s View when the Model that is bound to it gets updated.
The current best MVVM frameworks
These existing frameworks of MVVM can be utilized for the overall development of client-side web applications and can also be packaged as hybrid applications with the objective to operate on mobile devices.
AngularJS
This is the most widely used MVVM web framework majorly supported and maintained by Google. AngularJS needs very little boilerplate code for most simple applications and developer only needs to specify the Model of the application and create the bindings between the Model and the View by utilizing the template language.
EmberJS
Ember follows in the footsteps of Angular. It tries to achieve code minimalism and frees the developer from unnecessary boilerplate code and by utilizing declarative code when necessary. The entire ecosystem comprises Routes, Models, Templates and Services.
KnockoutJS
Knockout has features like declarative templates, data-bindings and automatic updates on the view given changes on the respective bound Model, fulfilling all the requirements that classify it as an MVVM framework. The ecosystem of Knockout consists of Models and Templates. Knockout is extensively used for MVVM framework development.
Conclusion
MVVM provides ample opportunities to web application developers for an agile and robust application development process. Most companies choose MVVM process because of its maturity and speed.
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