Domain Driven Design - Modeling

DomainDrivenDesignQuicklyOnline.pdf

Preface: Why DDD Quickly?
first heard about Domain Driven Design and met Eric Evans at a small gathering of architects at a mountain summit organized by Bruce Eckel in the summer of 2005.

The summit was attended by a number of people I respect, including Martin Fowler, Rod Johnson, Cameron Purdy, Randy Stafford, and Gregor Hohpe.

The group seemed quite impressed with the vision of Domain Driven Design, and was eager to learn more about it. I also got the feeling that everyone wished that these concepts were more mainstream. When I noticed how Eric used the domain model to discuss solutions to some of the various technical challenges the group discussed, and how much emphasis he placed on the business domain instead of technology-specific hype, I knew right away that this vision is one that the community sorely needed.

We, in the enterprise development community, especially the web development community, have been tainted by years of hype that took us away from proper object oriented software development. In the Java community, good domain modeling was lost in the hype of EJB and the container/component models of 1999-2004. Luckily, shifts in technology and the collective experiences of the software development community are moving us back towards traditional object oriented paradigms.

However, the community is lacking a clear vision for how to apply object orientation on an enterprise scale, which is why I think DDD is important.

Unfortunately, outside of a small group of the most senior architects, I perceived that very few people were aware of DDD, which is why InfoQ commissioned the writing of this book. It is my hope that by publishing a short, quickly-readable summary and introduction to the fundamentals of DDD and making it freely downloadable on InfoQ with an inexpensive pocket-sized print version, this vision can become mainstream.

This book does not introduce any new concepts; it attempts to concisely summarize the essence of what DDD is, drawing mostly on Eric Evans’ original book on the subject, as well other sources since published such as Jimmy Nilsson’s Applying DDD and various DDD discussion forums. The book will give you a crash course on the fundamentals of DDD, but it is no substitute for the numerous examples and case studies provided in Eric’s
book or the hands-on examples provided in Jimmy’s book.

I highly encourage you to read both of these excellent works. In the meantime, if you agree that the community needs DDD to be part of our group consciousness, please let people know about this book and Eric’s work.

Floyd Marinescu

Co-founder & Chief Editor of InfoQ.com