Book Image

Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture - Second Edition

By : Tom Hombergs
4 (1)
Book Image

Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture - Second Edition

4 (1)
By: Tom Hombergs

Overview of this book

Building for maintainability is key to keep development costs low (and developers happy). The second edition of "Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture" is here to equip you with the essential skills and knowledge to build maintainable software. Building upon the success of the first edition, this comprehensive guide explores the drawbacks of conventional layered architecture and highlights the advantages of domain-centric styles such as Robert C. Martin's Clean Architecture and Alistair Cockburn's Hexagonal Architecture. Then, the book dives into hands-on chapters that show you how to manifest a Hexagonal Architecture in actual code. You'll learn in detail about different mapping strategies between the layers of a Hexagonal Architecture and see how to assemble the architecture elements into an application. The later chapters demonstrate how to enforce architecture boundaries, what shortcuts produce what types of technical debt, and how, sometimes, it is a good idea to willingly take on those debts. By the end of this second edition, you'll be armed with a deep understanding of the Hexagonal Architecture style and be ready to create maintainable web applications that save money and time. Whether you're a seasoned developer or a newcomer to the field, "Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture" will empower you to take your software architecture skills to new heights and build applications that stand the test of time.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Maintaining maintainability

Alright, I assume that you believe me that maintainability positively influences developer joy, productivity, and decision-making. How do we know that the changes we make to our code base increase (or at least don’t decrease) maintainability? How do we manage maintainability over time?

The answer to that question is to create and maintain an architecture that makes it easy to create maintainable code. A good architecture makes it easy to navigate the code base. In an easily navigable code base, it’s a breeze to modify existing features or add new features. The dependencies between the components of our application are clear and not tangled. In summary, good architecture increases maintainability:

Figure 1.5 – Software architecture influences maintainability

Figure 1.5 – Software architecture influences maintainability

By extension, a good architecture increases developer joy, developer productivity, developer retention, and decision-making. We could go on and find...