App Architecture

This book explains a range of application architectural patterns and their implementation techniques using a single example app, fully implemented in six architectural patterns.

Instead of advocating for any particular pattern, we lay out the problems all architectures are trying to address: constructing the app’s components, communicating between the view and the model, and handling non-model state.

We show high-level solutions to these problems and break them down to the level of implementation for six different architectural patterns — three commonly used and three more experimental.

The common architectures are Model-View-Controller, Online-Only Model-View-Controller, and Model-View-ViewModel + Coordinator. In addition to explaining these patterns conceptually and on the implementation level, we discuss solutions to commonly encountered problems, like massive view controllers.

On the experimental side we explain View-State-Driven Model-View-Controller, ModelAdaptor-ViewBinder, and the Elm architecture. By examining these experimental patterns, we extract valuable lessons that can be applied to other patterns and to existing code bases.