How To Go About This

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]
There are Passive Models and Active Models: Models that are unaware of their role in the MVC triad and models that update Controllers and Views of their status using an Observer pattern, respectively. Neither patterns suggest letting the View directly access the model. The latter, Active Models, allow for it via the Observer pattern (you only get Model updates, you don't alter the state of the Model). For the web, because of its stateless nature, it is generally recommended that you use a passive model.