In today’s episode, Jeffrey is going to talk about an architectural solution for code organization and dependency management.
You may have witnessed a code base that was so coupled and so difficult to change, changing one thing caused two other things to break in a seemingly different part of the code base that was totally unrelated. Then you become afraid to make changes. After that happens, refactoring to better patterns just stops in an effort to avoid those breakages.
When development slows, it produces more bugs than it fixed. Maybe it causes disruption in production. It’s a symptom of flawed architecture and flawed architecture doesn’t just mean your web app should have been a desktop or a mobile app. It means that there’s an architectural element missing.
When you find yourself drowning in a mountain of development work, just stop and back up and look for an architectural solution.
Back around 2008, Jeffrey published some articles on Onion Architecture which has some specific tenants for managing dependencies and the different types of code in an application. Since then, Onion Architecture has been published and referenced in books, articles and tutorials online.
There is a specific type of organizational structure for an application and that’s what Jeffrey calls Onion Architecture. This leads to more maintainable applications, emphasizing the separation of concerns throughout the system.
This architecture is not appropriate for just small websites, tiny applications, or small things that are short-lived or maybe even so targeted; you can basically memorize the whole code base and see it all together. This organizational structure is appropriate for long-lived business applications as well as applications with complex behavior. For example, it emphasizes the use of interfaces for behavior contracts and it forces the externalization of infrastructure.
