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?

When building a web adapter for an application, we should keep in mind that we are building an adapter that translates HTTP to method calls for the use cases of our application and translates the results back to HTTP and does not do any domain logic.

The application layer, on the other hand, should not do HTTP, so we should make sure not to leak HTTP details. This makes the web adapter replaceable by another adapter should the need arise.

When slicing web controllers, we should not be afraid to build many small classes that don't share a model. They are easier to grasp, to test, and support parallel work. It's more work initially to set up such fine-grained controllers, but it will pay off during maintenance.