Book Image

Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture

By : Tom Hombergs
Book Image

Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture

By: Tom Hombergs

Overview of this book

Building for maintainability is key to keeping development costs low and processes easy. 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. With this comprehensive guide, you’ll explore the drawbacks of conventional layered architecture and the advantages of domain-centric styles such as Robert C. Martin's Clean Architecture and Alistair Cockburn's Hexagonal Architecture. Then, you’ll dive into hands-on explanations on how to convert hexagonal architecture into actual code. You'll learn in detail about different mapping strategies between the layers of hexagonal architecture and discover how to assemble the architectural elements into an application. Additionally, you’ll understand how to enforce architecture boundaries, which 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.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

How Does This Help Me Build Maintainable Software?

If you have built layered architectures in the past, you can probably relate to some of the disadvantages discussed in this chapter, and you could maybe even add some more.

If done correctly, and if some additional rules are imposed on it, a layered architecture can be very maintainable and make changing or adding to the codebase a breeze.

However, the discussion shows that a layered architecture allows many things to go wrong. Without very strict self-discipline, it's prone to degrade and become less maintainable over time. And this self-discipline usually becomes a little less strict each time a manager draws a new deadline around the development team.

Keeping the traps of a layered architecture in mind will help us the next time we argue against taking a shortcut and for building a more maintainable solution instead – whether in a layered architecture or a different architecture style.