Controllers

Next up: Controllers! Being a developer who has had experience with PHP and the .NET framework... controllers are an entirely new beast to me. At the beginning, we were thinking of splitting up login functions, view functions, etc. into separate controllers. This was the way we were used to thinking about modularizing: taking sections of the application and having that chunk as one module. It took us a while to figure out that this was completely wrong!

A controller contains a number of actions. Actions. The name in itself tells you immediately that a controller should have several actions that are common. I guess we knew that, but we didn't know what the commonality was between the actions, until an epiphany hit us. The controller controls a particular model and all the actions corresponding to this model. Therefore, the way that we had first separated our application was based on ACTIONS! Completely wrong! Reconfiguring our minds, it became clear that we should have things like a User Controller, which would handle all of the actions that were to be done on a user, such as save, edit, create, etc.

Thinking in this way takes somewhat of a brain twist, as it is completely different than what we have been taught. However, this definitely opens up new doors and new things to learn. I'm not quite sure I can say I'm fully excited about this, but I can definitely see how all the code can be separated and easily found.

We'll have to play around with the controller some more to get a feel for things, but in the mean time, hang tight and we'll keep you updated!

W