Talk:Presentation–abstraction–control

As a general rule, encyclopedic entries should first and primarily discuss the ontological nature or essence of the subject matter without relying on its connection, relationships, or similarity with other encyclopedic entries to establish the definition of the subject. For example, we don't start off an article about Bill Clinton by first describing how similar he might be to another politician or describing him as his father's son, but we describe him by denoting the notable facts about his life (i.e. he was the 42nd president, severed from 1993-2001, was known for achievements or scandals X, Y, & Z, etc.). In this case, I think it best to first describe the PAC architecture, perhaps discuss its motivations and influencing patterns (which were the Seeheim and Arch models, not MVC), and perhaps have a section which is dedicated to its comparison to other well known patterns. Starting the first sentence by saying it is "... similar to Model-View-Controller" I believe is in poor form.

Also, technically the Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller pattern is not a subset of the PAC pattern, nor is it a derivation (which the word variation may be understood to imply). It is similar to the HMVC pattern, but the two evolved independent of each other. If HMVC is less strict then PAC would have to be considered a specialization of HMVC. That is to say, if we were to present a hierarchy of patterns organized by type with each node representing a further specialization of the parent node, then the HMVC would be the parent node to PAC. Of course, I'm just setting this forth as further argument that HMVC isn't a subset of PAC. Such a description here would actually be misleading (since PAC came first), though it may have use elsewhere as a way to navigate through the plethora of interactive architecture patterns.

(the above, per history: 01:53, 20 August 2007 Derekgreer)

PAC Should be described on its own merits

 * It would be good if PAC could be described more in relation to its own characteristics rather than merely in comparision with MVC.  Sounds like Derekgreer has the expertise to do so.  --Treekids 14:18, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * For me, all the article says is that it's like MVC, only hierarchical. I fail to see any benefit in that, because such a hierarchy only makes things more complex, but there must be some benefit to PAC, or it would presumably not be adopted. --Toon (talk) 10:51, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
 * As I understand it, one of the major differences is that each of the individual agents in PAC is like an MVA program (not like an MVC program). That is, crucially, in PAC it is the controller that takes center stage (similar to the adaptor in MVA); i.e., the presentation and abstraction can only be accessed indirectly by passing through the controller, and they cannot communicate with one another except by passing through the controller. Whereas in MVC the model takes center stage: communication flows from the controller to the model, and from the model to the view. The hierarchical nature of PAC is then a separate issue in addition to this difference in arranging the three components. 98.223.187.122 (talk) 21:50, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Stale link
The last link in the references section is stale: http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/home/uzdun/publications/ArchPatterns.pdf Txwikinger (talk) 18:25, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

First link should better point to: http://iihm.imag.fr/en/publication/C87a/ 92.74.230.165 (talk) 14:48, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Potential source of content
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2263416/what-is-the-hmvc-pattern is under the same license as Wikipedia, so content from there can freely be copied into the article (subject to satisfying the license conditions, e.g. providing credit - easy to do in a ref tag). Zazpot (talk) 02:38, 18 May 2018 (UTC)