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)

When to Use Which Mapping Strategy?

This is the million-dollar question, isn't it?

The answer is the usual, dissatisfying, "It depends."

Since each mapping strategy has different advantages and disadvantages, we should resist the urge to define a single strategy as a hard-and-fast global rule for the whole codebase. This goes against our instincts, as it feels untidy to mix patterns within the same code base. But knowingly choosing a pattern that is not the best pattern for a certain job, just to serve our sense of tidiness, is irresponsible, plain and simple.

Also, as software evolves over time, the strategy that was the best for the job yesterday might not still be the best for the job today. Instead of starting with a fixed mapping strategy and keeping it over time – no matter what – we might start with a simple strategy that allows us to quickly evolve the code and later move to a more complex one that helps us to better decouple the layers.

In order to decide...