Componentizing complex functionality in an MVC web app
- by NXT
Hi Everyone,
This is question about MVC web-app architecture, and how it can be extended
to handle componentizing moderately complex units of functionality.
I have an MVC style web-app with a customer facing credit card charge page.
I've been asked to allow the admins to enter credit card payments as well,
for times when credit cards are taken over the phone.
The customer facing credit card charge section of the website is currently
it's own controller, with approximately 3 pages and a login. That controller
is responsible for:
Customer login credential authentication
Credit card data collection
Calling a library to do the actual charge.
reporting the results to the user.
I would like to extract the card data collection pages into a component of
some kind so that I can easily reuse the code on the admin side of the app.
Right now my components are limited to single "view" pages with PHP style
embedded Perl code.
This is a simple, custom MVC framework written in Perl. Right now, controllers
are called directly from the framework to service web requests. My idea is to
allow controllers to be called from other controllers, so that I can componentize
more complex functionality.
For simplicity I think I prefer composition over inheritance, even though it will
require writing a bunch of pass-through methods (actions). Being Perl, I could in
theory do multiple inheritance.
I'm wondering if anyone with experience in other MVC web frameworks can comment
on how this sort of thing is usually done.
Thank you.
