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)

Deciding on an Architecture Style

So far, this book has presented an opinionated approach to building a web application in a hexagonal architecture style. From organizing code to taking shortcuts, we have answered many questions that this architecture style confronts us with.

Some of the answers in this book can be applied to the conventional layered architecture style. Some answers can only be implemented in a domain-centric approach such as the one proposed in this book. And some answers you might not even agree with, because they don't work in your experience.

The final questions we want answers for, however, are these: when should we actually use the hexagonal architecture style? And when should we instead stick with the conventional layered style (or any other style, for that matter)?

The Domain is King

It should have become obvious in the previous chapters that the main feature of a hexagonal architecture style is that we can develop the domain code free from diversions...