I’ve seen no case studies suggesting any scalability problems encountered with any of the current php/mvc frameworks.

Rails on the other hand has been done to death and the conclusion I came up with was down to engineering.

I’m sure there are far bigger problems ahead (bridging CDN’s with SOA’s?) than the situation dev’s face today, meh, can’t we all get along

As for the Smalltalk adoption rates, I think you can blame the training industry for that, always pushing for more coboal dev’s, and for what?

as for the term MVC, i’ll go with whatever floats your boat.

Ignoring the point that all those go beyond the implementation of that single pattern they revolve around, I’d like to point out that we, people, tend to give things names for various reasons.

One of those is to be able to identify them for what they are. Another is to be able to understand each other. And I’d guess this is the main reason for Mike’s commentary.

But we also use names as a psichological weapon, as a means to gain confidence over things. We give names to acquire familiarity with them, to confine what could be a vast array of concepts and details in one of two words. Imho, this is the main reason a lot of things get called MVC. At my workplace we even have a framework that’s called just ‘mvc’ and people refer to it as MVC v3 (which is kinda sad for a name, I must say).

So… the conclusion I reached a while ago is:
When people say MVC in a web context they just mean a way to separate those three concerns. And I know that, and they may or may not know that, but I don’t actually care much as far as we both understand eachother and what their/our code actually does and how it works.

Unfortunately, the web industry seemed to ignore many of the lessons already learnt in the software application development world and as such has gone through such a similar history.

For example, Software development learnt long ago that Waterfall methodology when applied often failed. They created / adopted / moved to more agile methodologies and they showed great success and adoption is slow in the web industry, but is happening.

Design and implementation lessons have also been ignored, Smalltalk is a great example of an Object Oriented language, but was largely ignored by the community as a whole. The web industry instead went through a transformation from functional to object oriented principles. Paradoxically, design patterns were also sidelined and then people started adopting them for their web applications.

The end result is a process that has been so accessible to all (because of its simplicity) has also meant that important learnings have been ignored – don’t be one of the ignorant masses! Learn, understand, adopt, change (yes be bold!) and feedback to the community, not everyone will understand or even want to hear what you have to say, but in the end it can only be beneficial.