Questions about MVC in Javascript and in general

Question

First, I would like to ask some very basic questions about MVC in general. Simple questions, but can't find any good answer for them.

Is MVC useful for a one man project, or is it only needed, when more people work on a project to make it easier to co-op?

How big a project needs to be, to make good use of MVC. I hear everywere that I should always use MVC, but even for big projects it looks like an overkill. I can't imagine how big something would need to be, for all this overcomplicating to pay off.

I have made a single player rpg that is pretty short, and I am trying to turn it into massive multiplayer. It is all for educational purpose only. So I was thinking to redo it with MVC, but even though it has a lot of functions and data to process it still looks way to simple and clear, to bother with MVC. Maybe if I am making so small projects that I can't see the benefits of using it, I just shouldn't use it?

Will using all the MVC additional code slow down my app in visible way?

Now about Javascript, there are some solutions for MVC avaliable. Are they worth using?

Thanks

Answer 1

MVC is just a pattern, guidelines to organize your project and decoupling your code, so the size of the team or the project is not relevant. I've made by myself a very simple website with a list and a couple of web forms using MVC and it was pretty faster to develop than other alternatives. If you have the opportunity to work with a powerful IDE like Visual Studio, you will find that most of the common things to do for building a web page/site are already automated. And I also have worked with 12 people in a bigger project using also an MVC approach without noticing differences.

One of the main advantages of using MVC is that you can change the whole front end in the future without having to make changes in your model or controller layer.

Also, using MVC doesn't have to slow down your code, it depends on your implementation. When using ASP.MVC instead of ASP.NET, for example, the code and download times are faster, in fact. With ASP.MVC you get rid of nonsense ViewState pieces of code and the html code generated is cleaner.

In my experience, MVC is an excellent pattern to chose for working in web projects, since the front end technologies are changing very fast and it gives the flexibility to evolve with them without having to annoy about the business logic.

I hope I have helped you.

You can find more info in: http://www.asp.net/mvc