Clean Architecture with Spring Boot

Content

Spring Boot applications usually follow an MVC structure, with database entities (e.g. Hibernate) often being passed directly into a service via repositories and, in the worst case, even returned to the frontend via REST controllers.

As the application grows, this often results in hard-to-maintain, entangled spaghetti code applications, also called Big Ball of Mudd.

Such code typically has few meaningful abstractions, relies mainly on primitive data types to model the domain, and mixes presentation, database, and business logic.

Exchanging dependencies, such as replacing one database technology with another, is nearly impossible. This also makes testing difficult, even at the unit test level.

The result is difficult-to-maintain software systems with high error rates, long implementation cycles, and low developer and customer satisfaction.

In recent years, architecture patterns such as Ports & Adapters and their variation “Clean Architecture”, together with Domain-Driven Design (DDD), have emerged as effective means to counteract such a development. However, you don’t have to have used Clean Architecture from the start of the project to be able to integrate it into your application!

In this course, you will learn how to effectively migrate complicated, hard-to-maintain Spring Boot applications step-by-step to Clean Architecture with clearly separated concerns using various refactoring techniques, while keeping the application deliverable at all times.

Practically tried and tested concepts and techniques from the following topics:

• How to effectively integrate Clean Architecture into a Spring Boot application.
• Most important Code Smells and how they can negatively impact code quality.
• Basic and advanced automated and manual refactoring techniques to solve these Code Smells and transition the application step-by-step into Clean Architecture.
• Fundamentals of Ports & Adapters (Hexagonal Architecture) as the basis of Clean Architecture.
• Different components of Clean Architecture and practical implementations of them.
• Different considerations and trade-offs regarding Clean Architecture and how they affect the target design.
• Embedding Clean Architecture in Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and how selected concepts from DDD can further concretize and enhance Clean Architecture.

The actual course content may differ from the above depending on the trainer, delivery, duration and the composition of participants.