Category: Architecture

Clean Architecture: Standing on the shoulders of giants

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

Robert C. Martin (AKA Uncle Bob) published his ideas about Clean Architecture back in 2012, in a post on his blog, and lectured about it at a few conferences.

The Clean Architecture leverages well-known and not so well-known concepts, rules, and patterns, explaining how to fit them together, to propose a standardised way of building applications.

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Onion Architecture

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

The Onion Architecture was coined by Jeffrey Palermo in 2008. As I see it, it builds on the Ports & Adapters Architecture by adhering to the idea of placing the domain in the centre of the application, externalising the delivery mechanisms (UI) and infrastructure used by the system (ORM, Search engines, 3rd party APIs, …). But it goes further and adds internal layers to it.

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Ports & Adapters Architecture

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

The Ports & Adapters Architecture (aka Hexagonal Architecture) was thought of by Alistair Cockburn and written down on his blog in 2005. This is how he defines its goal in one sentence:

Allow an application to equally be driven by users, programs, automated test or batch scripts, and to be developed and tested in isolation from its eventual run-time devices and databases.

Alistair Cockburn 2005, Ports and Adapters

I’ve seen some articles talking about the Ports & Adapters Architecture that said a lot about layers. However, I haven’t read anything about layers in the original Alistair Cockburn post.

The idea is to think about our application as the central artefact of a system, where all input and output reaches/leaves the application through a port that isolates the application from external tools, technologies and delivery mechanisms. The application should have no knowledge of who/what is sending input or receiving its output. This is intended to provide some protection against the evolution of technology and business requirements, which can make products obsolete shortly after they are developed, because of technology/vendor lock-down.

In this post, I’m going to dive into the following subjects:

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Domain-Driven Design

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

Domain-Driven Design was coined by Eric Evans in his fantastic book Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software, published in 2003. Eric Evans book was key in formalising many of the software development concepts that today we take for granted.

I can’t make an exhaustive review of DDD in a blog post. There are just too many important concepts associated with DDD. Fortunately, that’s also not the goal here. What I will do, however, is to list the DDD concepts that I find more relevant for the way I like to organise code and how I think of Architecture: the system-wide concepts that constitute the foundations for feature development.

In this post, I’m going to write about:

  • Ubiquitous language
  • Layers
  • Bounded contexts
  • Anti-Corruption Layer
  • Shared Kernel
  • Generic Subdomain

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Packaging & namespacing

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

The architecture of a system is the high-level view of that system, the big picture, the system design in broad strokes. The architectural decisions are the structural decisions in the system, the ones that affect the whole code base, the ones that define where everything else will be built on top of.

Amongst other things, architecture is responsible for deciding the systems:

  • Components
  • Relationships between components
  • Principles guiding the design and evolution of components and relationships

In other words, these are the design decisions that are more difficult to change as the system evolves, it’s the foundations that give support to feature development.

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EBI Architecture

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

The Entity-Boundary-Interactor (EBI) Architecture has been made known by Robert C. Martin in his talks about Clean Architecture (of which I will talk in a later post).

However, this pattern was published by Ivar Jacobson back in 1992, in his book Object-Oriented Software Engineering: A use case driven approach. At the time, Jacobson actually called it Entity-Interface-Control, but the name was changed so that “Interface” would not be confused with the “Interface” language construct (which some languages don’t even have) nor with “User Interface”, and “Control” would not be confused with the MVC Controller.

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MVC and its alternatives

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned about Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

Creating maintainable applications has always been the real long-term challenge of building applications.

Not long ago, I worked for a company whose core business application was a SaaS platform, used by a few thousands of client companies. That crucial application was three years old and had code files with HTML, CSS, business logic and SQL mixed up. Of course, two years after being released, the company decided to rebuild it from scratch. Although these situations still happen, today many of us know these practices are wrong and know how to avoid them.

However, back in the 1970s, mixing responsibilities was the common practice and people were still trying to discover how to do it better. As application complexity grew, making changes to the UI would inevitably imply changes to the business logic as well, increasing the complexity of the changes, the time spent to do those changes and the likelihood of bugs (because there would be more code changed).

MCV came into play to solve those problems, by promoting “separation of concerns” between front-end and back-end.

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Layered Architecture

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

Layering is a common practice to separate and organise code units by their role/responsibilities in the system.

In an object-oriented program, UI, database, and other support code often gets written directly into the business objects. Additional business logic is embedded in the behaviour of UI widgets and database scripts. This happens because it is the easiest way to make things work, in the short run.

When the domain-related code is diffused through such a large amount of other code, it becomes extremely difficult to see and to reason about. Superficial changes to the UI can actually change business logic. To change a business rule may require meticulous tracing of UI code, database code, or other program elements. Implementing coherent, model-driven objects becomes impractical. Automated testing is awkward. With all the technologies and logic involved in each activity, a program must be kept very simple or it becomes impossible to understand.

Eric Evans 2014, Domain-Driven Design Reference

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Monolithic Architecture

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

In the beginning, there was the Monolith… 😀

Building a monolith has always been the default Architectural Style. I mean, in the very beginning we had one file per application, then we started having applications with several files, and only since the 1990s we started to see applications composed of other applications (although the first experimentations were during the 1980s).

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Architectural Styles vs. Architectural Patterns vs. Design Patterns

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned on Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge. The contents of this post might make more sense if you read the previous posts in this series.

In the last post, I wrote about how programming languages have evolved and what it tells us: that they evolved always in the direction of providing for more modularity and encapsulation.

In the following posts, I will write about Architectural Styles and Architectural Patterns evolution, so today I will write about what is an Architectural Style and what is an Architectural Pattern.

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