HMVC VS Modular Separation VS Matchbox

[eluser]n0xie[/eluser]
Imagine you have a News Module. This will give you basic 'news'-list with some read more behaviour. Now you want a small sidebar where you list the 3 latest news items. Ideally you would just 'call' your news module, and it would provide you with some form of output with a list of items (styled or un-styled, depending on your preference).

This is what cross loading of modules is used for. It basically 'grabs' output from several modules, and turns them into 1 page.

You could achieve something similar without cross loading, but then you'd have to call the models inside of a module, which would defeat the whole purpose of modularity: the fact that is a standalone, self-contained application.