Book Image

Designing Hexagonal Architecture with Java

By : Davi Vieira
Book Image

Designing Hexagonal Architecture with Java

By: Davi Vieira

Overview of this book

Hexagonal architecture enhances developers' productivity by decoupling business code from technology code, making the software more change-tolerant, and allowing it to evolve and incorporate new technologies without the need for significant refactoring. By adhering to hexagonal principles, you can structure your software in a way that reduces the effort required to understand and maintain the code. This book starts with an in-depth analysis of hexagonal architecture's building blocks, such as entities, use cases, ports, and adapters. You'll learn how to assemble business code in the Domain hexagon, create features by using ports and use cases in the Application hexagon, and make your software compatible with different technologies by employing adapters in the Framework hexagon. Moving on, you'll get your hands dirty developing a system based on a real-world scenario applying all the hexagonal architecture's building blocks. By creating a hexagonal system, you'll also understand how you can use Java modules to reinforce dependency inversion and ensure the isolation of each hexagon in the architecture. Finally, you'll get to grips with using Quarkus to turn your hexagonal application into a cloud-native system. By the end of this hexagonal architecture book, you'll be able to bring order and sanity to the development of complex and long-lasting applications.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Architecture Fundamentals
7
Section 2: Using Hexagons to Create a Solid Foundation
12
Section 3: Becoming Cloud-Native

Defining value objects

As we have already seen in Chapter 2, Wrapping Business Rules inside the Domain Hexagon, entities are the elements we use to classify system components that have an identity. On the other hand, the value objects don't have an identity. We use value objects to describe those system parts where there is no need to define an identity. Then, we have aggregates that serve to encapsulate the objects' related entities and values.

I recommend starting by creating value objects first because they are like the building blocks, the raw material we'll use to build more elaborated value objects, and—most importantly—the entities. Now, we'll add all the value object classes on the Domain hexagon module created in the previous section when we bootstrapped the Domain hexagon. We'll use the following steps to define value objects:

  1. Let's start with the Id value object class, as follows:
    package dev.davivieira.topologyinventory...