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What are the differences between Presenter, Presentation Model, ViewModel and Controller?

Asked 2011-01-02T23:04:19.130
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I have a pretty good idea how each of these patterns work and know about some of the minor differences between them, but are they really all that different from each other?

It seems to me that the Presenter, Presentation Model, ViewModel and Controller are essentially the same concept.

Why couldn't I classify all of these concepts as controllers? I feel like it might simplify the entire idea a great deal.

Can anyone give a clear description of their differences?

I want to clarify that I do understand how the patterns work, and have implemented most of them in one technology or another. What I am really looking for is someone's experience with one of these patterns, and why they would not consider their ViewModel a Controller for instance.

I'll give some reputation points for this, but I'm looking for a really good answer.

model-view-controller design-patterns mvvm mvp presentation-model
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Martin Fowler has a page on UI design patterns, in which he defines and then talks about MVC, MVP and other patterns.

http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/uiArchs.html

A Controller is active in controlling the UI. For example it would handle any events triggered by the UI and deal with them appropriately.

A Presenter on the other hand is more passive, and simply displays data through the UI, which handles it's own events etc, or delegates them through the presenter to a service or command.

A ViewModel is a specific example of a Presenter, designed for use with WPF/Silverlight binding.

A Presentation Model is a model that can be presented directly by the view, so for example if your models implement INotifyPropertyChanged for data binding, they would be Presentation Models.

answered 2011-01-06T05:01:09.660

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