What does MVW stand for?

It stands indeed for whatever, as in whatever works for you per Igor Minar from 2012 (emphasis mine):

MVC vs MVVM vs MVP. What a controversial topic that many developers can spend hours and hours debating and arguing about.

For several years +AngularJS was closer to MVC (or rather one of its client-side variants), but over time and thanks to many refactorings and api improvements, it's now closer to MVVM – the $scope object could be considered the ViewModel that is being decorated by a function that we call a Controller.

Being able to categorize a framework and put it into one of the MV* buckets has some advantages. It can help developers get more comfortable with its apis by making it easier to create a mental model that represents the application that is being built with the framework. It can also help to establish terminology that is used by developers.

Having said, I'd rather see developers build kick-ass apps that are well-designed and follow separation of concerns, than see them waste time arguing about MV* nonsense. And for this reason, I hereby declare AngularJS to be MVW framework - Model-View-Whatever. Where Whatever stands for "whatever works for you".

Angular gives you a lot of flexibility to nicely separate presentation logic from business logic and presentation state. Please use it fuel your productivity and application maintainability rather than heated discussions about things that at the end of the day don't matter that much.

Having said, I'd rather see developers build kick-ass apps that are well-designed and follow separation of concerns, than see them waste time arguing about MV* nonsense. And for this reason, I hereby declare AngularJS to be MVW framework - Model-View-Whatever. Where Whatever stands for "whatever works for you".

Credits : AngularJS Post - Igor Minar

MVW stands for Model-View-Whatever.

For completeness, here are all the acronyms mentioned:

MVC - Model-View-Controller

MVP - Model-View-Presenter

MVVM - Model-View-ViewModel

MVW / MV* / MVx - Model-View-Whatever

And some more:

HMVC - Hierarchical Model-View-Controller

MMV - Multiuse Model View

MVA - Model-View-Adapter

MVI - Model-View-Intent