Web 2.0 Design Patterns

If you’ve been following through this series of articles, you will have learned a lot about Web 2.0 and in particular, about Flash and the Ajax approach to building Web applications. Now it’s time to look at a bit of background information, in particular, one design pattern that often underlies Web 2.0 approaches.

Design patterns are useful because they give us a way to structure applications to make sure that they are efficient. They provide solutions to common development problems. Instead of focusing on the code itself, design patterns focus on the overall architecture of the application using Object-Oriented approaches.

Design patterns are a hot topic and you’ll find much written on the Web about them. You might notice that there is not always agreement among the authors! Some common design patterns include:

• Observer
• Singleton
• Decorator
• MVC (Model-View-Controller)

Within Web development, the MVC pattern is a very popular for building applications as it represents a way to separate different components of the application. In particular, it separates out the presentation layer from the data powering an application; something that most developers would agree is a good idea. In this article, I want to look at how the MVC pattern might apply in Web 2.0 approaches to building Web applications.