The evolution of user-oriented devices has been happening so fast that we could call it a revolution. Some of the authors of this book remember piles of punch cards and magnetic tapes, yet today we discuss video cameras embedded into contact lenses. Despite the rapid changes, some ideas are so fundamental that they seem to have been around forever. For example, one of the most influential factors in this area was the invention of the computer mouse by Douglas Engelbart in the 1960s, along with the hypertext and rectangle-like screen presentations called windows.
In this chapter, we will discuss the technologies that support interaction with the end user; this is commonly called the presentation layer. We will talk about web and desktop applications; Silverlight, ASP.NET, and WPF; and we'll focus on three major patterns: MVC, MVP, and MVVM.
The term "presentation layer" may be a little deceiving, since in information technology, it is used in two different...