There were lots of MVC frameworks for web development that predated Rails. For example Struts.

And MVC was talked about a lot as a design pattern for Web apps before Struts was started - I remember we rolled our own rather nifty one in 2001 or so and failed to get our execs to open source it so it died when the team withered away after our acquisition.

Struts was released in 2000, so it predates yours. However I know people who were using MVC as a design pattern in Perl in the 90s.

MVC comes from the Smalltalk world. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ModelViewControllerHistory

But it is quite different from web MVC that was popular with web frameworks like Struts.

I haven't looked at the more recent javascript frameworks, but my intuition tells me that they are probably going back to the original MVC pattern. (Observer pattern to notify views when model changes)

Said history was referred to in the top level comment that started this discussion.

I've had as a low priority idea for a few years implementing a web MVC framework that is somewhat closer to the original inspiration - not because it makes sense for generating HTML (though it actually works quite well for that) - but because it would reduce the impedance mismatch with a client-side library using the original MVC pattern.

I have not actually done this for a number of reasons. The top one being that when you scratch an itch that you think someone else should have, it is much less fun and likely to work right than when you scratch your own itch. But it still bugs me that nobody has written one that works like I think it should...

What I meant was that Struts wasn't the first mention of MVC in relation to web apps - lots of people were rolling their own frameworks in 2000/2001 and MVC was a common buzzword.

As most developers in those days hadn't started with web apps it wasn't surprising that the term MVC was used - e.g. we were writing MVC C++ wrappers for simulations in 93/94 and Java MVC simulations in applets from '95.

I agree that Struts wasn't first on the web.

But a 2000-2001 handrolled MVC framework does not qualify as "pre-Struts".

LOL ... I am old! I learned MVC developing MFC apps back in the 90s!!

I resemble that remark... I'm also old.

I was writing RDBMS in dBase, compiled with Clipper, on MS-DOS, in the early 1990's, when I was about 30 years of age. (I was the "old guy" 20 years ago)

Wow! The decades just keep passing by with increasing relevant speed.

Clipper! yes that was the first language I used professionally.

I tell the younger guys that before IDE's and flat memory models were around, when you programmed, you went looking to buy three things.

1. Language/Compiler 2. Linker 3. Editor

And you will spend just as much time in the linker file (segmented memory back then) as you did coding.

The newer tools are just light years ahead of where they started back then. Its one area I will never look back at and wish it was still around.

It is a well-documented fact that time passes as a percentage of life lived. There is far less relative distance between decades for me now than there was between my fourth and fifth birthdays. I have kids who have kids, and they weren't around for that last episode of MASH (left out the asterisks for formatting reasons) that I'm pretty sure (in what's left of my mind) was first aired a couple of years ago.

A friend of mine told me this longer ago than I care to be reminded of. "The older you are, the faster time goes. The telescoping effect can be quite startling."