" The impedance mismatch between these two worlds, that of events, and that of objects, is something that's been recognized for a long time. Getting these two worlds to cooperate requires a lot of 'glue code' to make them work together . The 'model-view-controller' paradigm introduces the controller object in between the view (the GUI class) and the model (the object) to communicate between the other two objects. The actual implementation of the controller object can vary quite a bit, but the idea of an object to 'transform' events to changes in data and execution of methods is the essence of this pattern. What does "event driven" mean? Was there ever an application which did not respond to user events. . ? Just because an application responds to events does not mean it is "event driven". Model Railroad Forum Event driven means it spends much of its time waiting for an event and then takes action if and when an event occurs. Contrast this with some programs that do not respond to events at all, but simply do their job and terminate. "

" We discuss some of those here. View instability vs. model stability If constructed correctly, models can enjoy a fair degree of stability (owing to the stability of the domain model), whereas user interface code usually undergoes frequent and sometimes dramatic change (typically because of usability problems, the need to support growing classes of users, or simply the need to keep the application looking "fresh"). Separating the view from the model makes the model more robust, because the developer is less likely to "break" the model while reworking the view. Attempting to stitch these two worlds together in a hand coded method without architecture is very common, and results in the model object being polluted with knowledge of the interface, and vice-versa. This makes the code very inflexible and difficult to maintain. For this reason (among others), many programming shops develop the user interface design early in the process of design, and freeze the interface early. Walthers Model Railroad The unfortunate side effect of this is that the domain of the problem often isn't clearly understood by the programmers until late in the implementation process. Thus, just at the time that the developers are finally competent to create a good interface, they are kept from changing it. "