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)

A tale about side effects

I once was part of a project where my team inherited a ten-year-old code base built by another software shop. The client had decided to replace the development team to reduce the ongoing maintenance costs and improve the development speed for new features. So, we got the contract.

As was to be expected, it was not easy to gain an understanding of what the code actually did, and the changes we made in one area of the code base often had side effects in other areas. But we managed by testing exhaustively, adding automated tests, and refactoring a lot.

After some time of successfully maintaining and extending the code base, the client requested a new feature. And they wanted us to build it in a way that was very awkward for the users of the software. So, I proposed to do it in a more user-friendly way that was even less expensive to implement since it needed fewer overall changes. It needed a small change in a certain very central component, however.

...