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)

Different input models for different use cases

We might be tempted to use the same input model for different use cases. Let’s consider the Register account and Update account details use cases. Both will initially need almost the same input, namely some account details, such as a username and email address.

The Update use case will need the ID of the account that needs to be updated, however, while the Register use case does not. If both use cases use the same input model, we will always have to pass a null account ID into the Register use case. This is annoying at best, and detrimental at worst, because both use cases are coupled to evolve together now.

Allowing null as a valid state of a field in our immutable command object is a code smell by itself. But more importantly, how are we handling input validation now? Validation has to be different for the Register and Update use cases since one needs an ID and the other doesn’t. We’d have to build custom validation...