Model-view-controller (MVC)

Model-view-controller (MVC) is an architectural pattern, commonly used to implement user interfaces, that divides a system into three interconnected parts to separate responsibilities. The model manages the data and logic of the system, the "truth" that gets shown or displayed, and does not depend on any of its views. The view is any output representation of the model’s information. A single model can have multiple views. The controller accepts input, typically from the user, and converts it into commands for the model or the view.

The strict one-way dependency, that a model knows nothing of its views or controllers, is what makes MVC useful beyond a single GUI screen. The same model can be rendered by several independent views at once, and a controller can be swapped without touching the model at all. But, in practice, this clean separation doesn’t always hold. A view and its controller are often paired so closely that many implementations merge them into one component.

MVC is one of several sibling patterns for structuring interactive UIs, alongside model-view-viewmodel (MVVM) and model-view-update (MVU). Where MVC routes user input through an explicit controller, MVVM binds the view to a view model, and MVU replaces both with a pure update function that produces a new model from each event.