PPPDDD.3 – Focusing on the Core Domain

An application is made of several components and sub-components, all of which are essential to the functioning of the application. However, there are components more important than others. Continue reading “PPPDDD.3 – Focusing on the Core Domain”

PPPDDD.2 – Distilling the Problem Domain

Distilling the problem domain is about understanding the problem and its domain  in order to uncover what is relevant and create a model that reflects the domain and solves the problem at hand. In DDD, the activity of doing this is called in Knowledge Crunching. Continue reading “PPPDDD.2 – Distilling the Problem Domain”

PPPDDD.1 – What is Domain Driven Design?

Building software that works is not difficult.

What is indeed difficult is to build software that lasts for many years, that keeps working despite the changes needed by the business, needed by the users, needed by new technologies. Building software that is permanently ready for change, and permanently and accurately reflects the business… thats the tricky part. Continue reading “PPPDDD.1 – What is Domain Driven Design?”

PEAA.8 – Putting it all together

This chapter is a bit more than a revision to the previous chapters. Much of what Fowler states, is outdated. Many of the questions he had at the time are not questions any more, they are certainties, some were even trendy and are currently outdated.

In any case, mixing his view at the time with my understanding of what is common practice now days, this is what I take out of this chapter. Continue reading “PEAA.8 – Putting it all together”

PEAA.7 – Distribution strategies

This chapter talks about options to build a distributed system. However it is extremely outdated, as an example I quote ” SOAP is probably going to be the most common form…”. It turns out that the SOAP golden days were not there yet and currently have already passed. Now days most distributed systems are doing Microservices through RESTfull interfaces.

If we want to dive into this subject there are plenty of resources out there:

This post is part of a set of posts with my personal notes about all the chapters in the book “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” by Martin Fowler. I will do this as I read through the book, and take notes on the concepts I personally find more relevant.

PEAA.6 – Session state

Stateless objects are objects with no properties. However when we talk about a stateless server, we are talking about an architecture where the objects do not retain state between requests. This does not mean that the data is lost between requests, it merely means that the data is somehow temporarily persisted during the business transaction, the process handling the request is terminated and the server resources are freed. A new request can, then, resurrect the temporarily persisted data and continue the business transaction.

HTTP servers are stateless, as is the HTTP protocol. Despite this, when we look at a shopping cart in a web shop, we have a session and the items in the cart are preserved between requests without the business transaction been finished and its data being permanently persisted. This makes it in fact a stateful session. Continue reading “PEAA.6 – Session state”

PEAA.5 – Concurrency

Concurrency occurs when different processes or applications need the same resource to continue to work. To understand when this happens and how to deal with these issues, we need to talk about execution contexts, racing conditions, inconsistent reads, deadlocks and transactions. Continue reading “PEAA.5 – Concurrency”

PEAA.4 – Web Presentation

Back when this book was written, using the web for building enterprise applications was a new practise.

Although, in the beginning, it was a common practise to mix presentation logic with business logic and even persistence logic (think HTML mixed with SQL), it soon became clear that it was very difficult to change the UI if it was not decoupled from all other logic.

The MVC patter, which was around since the late 1970s, came to the resqueue and became the common practise. The most important reason to use MVC is to decouple presentation logic from business logic.

Continue reading “PEAA.4 – Web Presentation”

PEAA.3 – Mapping to relational DBs

There are 3 patterns to handle data persistence to relational DBs:

  • Active Record
  • Gateway
  • Data Mapper

Associated to this patterns, we have a few more design patterns to help implement the previous ones:

  • Unit of work
  • Identity map
  • Lazy loading

And we also have 3 patterns to structure the data in the DB:

  • Single table inheritance
  • Concrete table inheritance
  • Class table inheritance

Continue reading “PEAA.3 – Mapping to relational DBs”