> MVC was originally designed as a pattern for desktop UIs. It has a single controller and a single model
Not quite. Let me quote from "A cookbook for using the model-view controller user interface paradigm in Smalltalk-80" by Glenn E. Krasner and Stephen T. Pope, 1988, which according to Wikipedia defined the term MVC originally:
> In the scheme described above, views and controllers have exactly one model, but a model can
have one or several views and controllers associated with it.
All that said, they mean that you should use separate controller-view pairs for entirely different pieces of the application. A nice example would be MS Word's document editor (1 view with 1 controller) and MS Word's Print Preview view (same model, but a separate view and a separate controller).
What I was getting at is that in backend-MVC (and backbonejs-MVC), you usually build a view, a controller and a model for each domain entity (i.e. for each database table). This is fundamentally different from what Krasner and Pope describe, and it probably won't work well for the kinds of dynamism and interactivity most single-page apps are single-page apps for. I believe this is the flavor of MVC the author is talking about.
In our case at TalkJS, we don't have anything like a print preview - essentially our entire application is a pretty unified piece of UI (much like MS Word's document editor which, while complex, is pretty much inseparable), so we have only one controller and one root view. I made the thinking mistake that most UIs only have one root view, and of course that's not true. So thanks for that.
The Model, View, Controller terms were originally defined by Trygve Reenskaug in 1978, based on his Smalltalk involvement, and formalised as Models-Views-Controllers in a 1979 paper.
Not quite. Let me quote from "A cookbook for using the model-view controller user interface paradigm in Smalltalk-80" by Glenn E. Krasner and Stephen T. Pope, 1988, which according to Wikipedia defined the term MVC originally:
> In the scheme described above, views and controllers have exactly one model, but a model can have one or several views and controllers associated with it.