Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture

Book excerpt: Gain insight into how hexagonal architecture can help to keep the cost of development low over the complete lifetime of an application Key FeaturesExplore ways to make your software flexible, extensible, and adaptableLearn new concepts that you can easily blend with your own software development styleDevelop the mindset of building maintainable solutions instead of taking shortcutsBook Description We would all like to build software architecture that yields adaptable and flexible software with low development costs. But, unreasonable deadlines and shortcuts make it very hard to create such an architecture. Get Your Hands Dirty on Clean Architecture starts with a discussion about the conventional layered architecture style and its disadvantages. It also talks about the advantages of the domain-centric architecture styles of Robert C. Martin's Clean Architecture and Alistair Cockburn's Hexagonal Architecture. Then, the book dives into hands-on chapters that show you how to manifest a hexagonal architecture in actual code. You'll learn in detail about different mapping strategies between the layers of a hexagonal architecture and see how to assemble the architecture elements into an application. The later chapters demonstrate how to enforce architecture boundaries. You'll also learn what shortcuts produce what types of technical debt and how, sometimes, it is a good idea to willingly take on those debts. After reading this book, you'll have all the knowledge you need to create applications using the hexagonal architecture style of web development. What you will learnIdentify potential shortcomings of using a layered architectureApply methods to enforce architecture boundariesFind out how potential shortcuts can affect the software architectureProduce arguments for when to use which style of architectureStructure your code according to the architectureApply various types of tests that will cover each element of the architectureWho this book is for This book is for you if you care about the architecture of the software you are building. To get the most out of this book, you must have some experience with web development. The code examples in this book are in Java. If you are not a Java programmer but can read object-oriented code in other languages, you will be fine. In the few places where Java or framework specifics are needed, they are thoroughly explained.