Domain-Driven Design (DDD)

Blog post featuring end-to-end method and tool chain to get from domain-driven designs to service APIs (with Context Mapper and MDSL)

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) proposes techniques and patterns to deal with the intrinsic complexity in software development, both organizationally and technically. Key DDD themes are business-orientation, domain modeling, and knowledge reuse both on the strategical (i.e., long term, cross-project) and on the tactical (i.e., application, project, product) level. DDD has been around, in active use on real-world projects, and supported by a Community since the first DDD book came out in 2003; it recently became particularly popular in the microservices community as a way to identify service boundaries (via strategic DDD).

Key Patterns (Selection): 

• General: Ubiquitous Language, Model-Driven Design, Layered Architecture

• Tactic DDD: Entity, Value Object; Aggregate, Root Entity, Service, Domain Event; Factory, Repository
• Strategic DDD: Bounded Context, Context Map; Published Language, Shared Kernel, Open Host Service, Customer-Supplier, Conformist, Anti Corruption Layer (context relationship types)

See DDD reference for pattern summaries (PDF, Word) and/or DDD glossary in community website.

Introductions

• What is Domain-Driven Design (DDD), DDD Community
• The Anatomy Of Domain-Driven Design - Booklet by S. Millet
• D. Laribee, An Introduction to DDD, MSDN Best Practice, February 2009
• D. Haywood, An Introduction to Domain Driven Design, Methods & Tools
• Speaker decks by M. Ploed, start here

Books (Selection, Reverse Chronological Order)

• M. Ploed, Hands-on Domain-diven Design - by example, Leanpub
• Domain-Driven Design: The First 15 Years, Leanpub
• V. Vernon, DDD Distilled; a German translation is available: DDD Kompakt
• S. Millett with N. Tune, Patterns, Principles, and Practices of DDD, J. Wiley & Sons 2015
• V. Vaughn, Implementing DDD, Addison Wesley 2014
• F. Marinescu, Domain-Driven Design Quickly (InfoQ e-book, 2006)
• E. Evans, Domain-Driven Design - Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software (the book that started it all), Addison Wesley 2003 (a non-technical reading path is recommended here and additional resources from the Domain Language consultancy can be found here)

Tools

• Context Mapper by Stefan Kapferer (DSL and tools for strategic DDD), presented at JUG CH (slides)
• Sculptor (DSL and tool for tactic DDD)
• vlingo/platform (to be continued)

Sample Implementations

• Lakeside Mutual scenario, a set of JavaScript frontends and Spring Boot backends featuring strategic and tactic DDD in addition to Microservice API Pattens (MAP)
• DDD Sample Application implementing example from first DDD book (SourceForge, GitHub)

More Information

• DDD content on InfoQ
• DDD and REST (in Microservices Context), ICWE 2016 (Un-)Panel moderated by O. Zimmermann
• Recorded conference presentations on DDD and Microservices by E. Evans, V. Vernon and M. Ploed.
• DDD Community

Kontakt: Olaf Zimmermann