According to the book ,
‘Domain-driven design is an approach to building application software that focuses on the bit that matters in enterprise applications: the core business domain. Rather than putting all your effort into technical concerns, you work to identify the key concepts that you want the application to handle, you try to figure out how they relate, and you experiment with allocating responsibilities (functionality). Those concepts might be easy to see (Customers, Products, Orders, and so on), but often there are more subtle ones (Payable, ShippingRecipient, and RepeatingOrder) that won’t get spotted the first time around. So, you can use a team that consists of business domain experts and developers, and you work to make sure that each understands the other by using the common ground of the domain itself.’
Since being a domain expert is the next step for any developer naturally, as his experience increases, there is need to have more insight into the business stuff, instead of just the software. UML although does a great job for explaining the Object Oriented stuff, but ponder for a second, how is it really going to help a businessman that is interested in getting more profits. Naked Objects framework (http://www.nakedobjects.org) is based on the design pattern with same name(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/naked_objects) is an open source framework (only for java, .NET is a commercial one) that converts simple bean/components automatically into an interface(read as multiple applications).
Don’t yet confuse this with prototyping because DDD incorporates both the developer and the domain expert teams and we are not just creating the UI.
DDD’s 2 central premises explained :
- A ubiquitous language for integrating & easing communication between domain experts instead of 2, which is the existing norm(like code & UML)
- Using model-driven design that aims to capture the model of the business process. This is done in code, rather than just visually, as was the case earlier.
Naked Objects
The java based Naked Objects(NO) framework is an evolutionary step forward from Rails (and its other avatars : Grails, Spring Roo, asp.net MVC, etc) that focuses more on M & V rather than MVC and provides much more domain-specific applications in turn resulting in flexibility for all.
A typical NO application consists of multiple sub-projects like the core domain, fixture, service, command line and webapp project through a maven archetype. The coolest thing is that NO automatically displays the domain objects in an O-O based UI that offers display in more flexible manner than any other IDE.
NO also challenges the common frontend-middleware-backend convention and instead applies the Hexagonal architecture (http://alistair.cockburn.us/Hexagonal+architecture) that deals with the bigger picture in mind. The development in this framework is pojo centric and is heavily based on annotations, which should be pretty much regular stuff for any JEE developer. Also, during my initial evaluation of the framework, the code that’s being generated during the development is of maintainable quality, which is virtually essential for maintenance and scaling in any enterprise application.
Hence this book, and its field of study is highly recommended for any enterprise developer/ team/ manager/ domain expert and as is repeatedly mentioned, becomes highly important when one has more years of experience under his belt. I am continuing my exploration in this and if it is really useful for me, would post some exercises here.
Reference: Domain-Driven Design Using Naked Objects from our JCG partner Sumit Bisht at the Sumit Bisht blog.
