Joomla Terminology: view, layout, task and component development

Question

I'm a developer and I am very confident with MVC patterns and have already developed a lot of web apps from scratch using PHP frameworks like symfony and yii. However, I'm a little bit confused about Joomla MVC and terminology. Even after googling a lot, reading Joomla book extension guides, and reading Joomla websites I'm still confused. What is confusing for me is the component MVC structure and how I have to set up "my way of thinking" about Joomla MVC, for doing things in the Joomla way.

In particular I am used to reasoning in terms of controller/action (like in symfony and yii framework)

So the final list of all my webapp url will be

 controller1/action1
 controller1/action2
 controller1/action3

 controller2/action1
 controller2/action2

Each controller's action will decide what view to render and what layout to use for showing the view. In particular in these frameworks, the definition of a layout is exactly the meaning of a layout. And the view is the "core part" of the page.

So I can have a view with a list of users and I can put this view inside a mobile layout or a desktop layout, or to build a view for mobile and put it only in the mobile layout and so on.

The final result of the directory structure in my webapp is something similar to the following:

 controllers/
    controller1
    controller2
    controller3
models/
    modelForTableA
    modelForTableB
views/
   controller1/
     viewForAction1
     viewForAction2
layouts/
    mobileLayout.php
    desktopLayout.php

and for me it is very clear to understand.

So finally my questions are:

• what would be the directory structure in joomla?
• what is the definition of view, layout and task in Joomla?

I need to clarify that I do not need an explanation about MVC works in general, but if I could achieve the same result as before, how do I have to organize my code and my work?

Suppose that I want to build a component with the following "url"

userController/addUser
userController/editUser
userController/listUsers
userController/viewUserDetail

anotherController/addOperation
anotherController/editOperation
anotherController/myNonCrudOperation

Thank you very much

Answer 1

Running ahead a little bit let me provide you with link to JooYii Library. This library makes a leap ahead brings some practices that would be at Joomla! 4 to current Joomla! 3.x branch along with other good things [common MVC, methods variables checks and bindings and other]. It's not reached first master yet, but only few inches around.

What concerns explanation of "Joomla specific MVC approach":

Components are more like independent applications. So what you need to know on "Terminology" and ways to achieve what you want to:

• controller.php - Main controller;
• controllers/anycontroller.php - Sub-controller;
• models/anymodel.php - Your model, [!] not something like Yii model, just "sqls helper";
• tables/anytable.php - Something like Yii model, but only like. It's not active record by representation of table`s row;
• views/anyview/view.html.php - not view, but something like 'Extension of controller', included in controller`s display method;
• views/anyview/tmpl/default.php - view`s layout, that's what you call 'view' at Yii, commonly;

Well that's it. All you need to know on terminology.

How to implement calls like controller/action.

• set your component to the homepage to call it like controller/action or use /component/yourcomponent/controller/action
• next step is to create router.php and set up parseRoute() to parse your route like $vars['task'] = $segments[0].$segments[1]

That's it, you're there. In super native joomla way you route to index.php?option=com_yourcomponent&task=controller.action instead.