PHP Tutorial: The Problem with MVC (it's time to move on!)

This video will not have any coding but just a short discussion about MVC. As I'm sure you know, MVC has been the dominant programming architecture of not just the PHP community but the entire web development community for the best part of about fifteen years.

MVC's popularity came about because it was the architecture of choice by the genius Next team who worked for Steve Jobs by in the 90s. Had I been a part of that team at that time then I would have applauded MVC. It was a great choice and perhaps even a perfect choice at that time.

However, times have moved on and I think it's time for the web development community to move on from MVC. That's because modern websites cannot be easily divided into three parts (M, V and C). For example, let's suppose you have a JSON file that defines the routing for some API endpoints. Which folder does that fit into?

It is the models folder? Certainly not! It has nothing to do with data!

It is the views folder? Again, no. There's no HTML or any viewable / presentation content at all.

How about the controllers folder? Once again, no. That's because there's no PHP computation required. We're just doing some routing for some endpoints!

What's very clear is that modern web applications require an architecture that is a bit more portable and flexible than MVC. This is the topic of conversation here.

PLEASE NOTE: This video is part of a series on PHP from intermediate to advanced.