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?

Software architecture is basically all about managing dependencies between architecture elements. If the dependencies become a big ball of mud, the architecture becomes a big ball of mud.

So, to preserve the architecture over time, we need to continually make sure that dependencies point in the right direction.

When producing new code or refactoring existing code, we should keep the package structure in mind and use package-private visibility when possible to avoid dependencies on classes that should not be accessed from outside the package.

If we need to enforce architecture boundaries within a single build module, and the package-private modifier doesn't work because the package structure won't allow it, we can make use of post-compile tools such as ArchUnit.

And anytime we feel that the architecture is stable enough, we should extract architecture elements into their own build modules because this gives explicit control over the...