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?

Spring and Spring Boot (and similar frameworks) provide a lot of features that make our lives easier. One of the main features is assembling applications out of the parts (classes) that we, as application developers, provide.

Classpath scanning is a very convenient feature. We only have to point Spring to a package and it assembles an application from the classes it finds. This allows for rapid development, with us not having to think about the application as a whole.

Once the code base grows, however, this quickly leads to a lack of transparency. We don't know which beans exactly are loaded into the application context. Also, we cannot easily startup isolated parts of the application context to use in tests.

By creating a dedicated configuration component responsible for assembling our application, we can liberate our application code from this responsibility (read: "reason for change" – remember the "S" in...