With the rise of NoSQL, Is it more common these days to have a webapp without any model?
The NoSQL effort has to do with creating a persistence layer that scales with modern applications using non-normalized data structures for fast reads & writes and data formats like JSON, the standard format used by ajax based systems. It is sometimes the case that transaction based relational databases do not scale well, but more often than not poor performance is directly related to poor data modeling, poor query creation and poor planning.
No persistence layer should have anything to do with your domain model. Using a data abstraction layer, you transform the data contained in your objects to the schema implemented in your data store. You would then use the same DAL to read data from your data store, transform and load it into your objects.
Your data store could be XML files, an RDBMS like SQL Server or a NoSQL implementation like CouchDB. It doesn't matter.
FWIW, I've built and inherited plenty of applications that used no model at all. For some, there's no need, but if you're using an object model it has to fit the needs of the application, not the data store and not the presentation layer.
With the rise of NoSQL, is it more common these days to have a webapp without any model and process everything in the controller? Is this a bad pattern in web development? Why should we abstract our database related function in a model when it is easy enough to fetch the data in nosql?
Note
I am not asking whether RDBMS/SQL is not relevant because that will only start flamewar.