Can anyone explain to me in lay-mans terms about Model-View-Controller and using CakePHP to build web applications?

Also, developing a web app that works well on mobile devices? Is this down with MVC?

generic explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller

cakephp specific:
http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/index.html

So you have a Model which is bound to a View. This View is displayed the user. The user then manipulates the Model with the Controller. If the Model is manipulated a notification is sent to the View that this Model is bound to forcing it to update its display. Thus, using the Controller changes the Model which changes the View that is displayed to the user.

I am not very keen on CakePHP so I will let someone else take the helm with that.

MVC is a design pattern that is very popular for web application development.

This post was edited by Minkomonster on Feb 19 2014 08:15pm

But how do you implement something like this? Say we want to use MVC for our web application... how do we design it besides using standing HTML/PHP

views are each screen/panel/component, models are everything stored in the database, controller has all the logic. look at the documentation for examples. imo you need to try stuff out.

This post was edited by carteblanche on Feb 19 2014 09:23pm

think of it more as a way to organize your code. its not a program or anything that you install.

I understand more of MVC now where Model = database, view = the display, and controller is where the logic is handled via PHP/etc.



Anyone care to take me through CakePHP? I'm looking at the documentation but don't really understand how to code a complex web application with it.

Not to be rude, but this isn't a practical request.
You don't understand how to code a complex web application with a PHP framework after looking at the documentation?
I'm sorry your ability to absorb information isn't at a superhuman level.
I would like to suggest that you start with a simple CakePHP application.
If it stumps you then feel free to provide specific errors, complications, etc and we will (perhaps) do our best to help.

TL;DR - It's very unlikely anybody here is going to be able/willing to summarize a framework in such a way that "complex applications" become simple. If it were that simple I'm sure the writers of the framework would include such a summary in the documentation itself.