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?

With incoming and outgoing ports acting as gatekeepers between the layers of our application, they define how the layers communicate with each other and thus whether and how we map between layers.

With narrow ports in place for each use case, we can choose different mapping strategies for different use cases, and even evolve them over time without affecting other use cases, thus selecting the best strategy for a certain situation at a certain time.

This selection of mapping strategies per situation certainly is harder and requires more communication than simply using the same mapping strategy for all situations, but it will reward the team with a codebase that does just what it needs to do and is easier to maintain, as long as the mapping guidelines are known.