Adventures in IT

Image: Pixabay Breaking your application down into components can be a useful approach to a "divide and conquer" methodology.  Assigning specific behaviour to a component and then defining interfaces for other components to access it allows you to develop a service driven architecture.  I'm in the process of decomposing a monolithic application into services that will eventually become standalone micro-services.  Part of the task ahead lies in determining the service boundaries, which are analogous to software components for my micro-service application.  I want components to be modular to allow them to be developed and deployed as independently as possible.  I'm using the approach suggested by Eric Evans in his  book on domain driven design  where he describes the concept of "bounded contexts".  I like to think of a bounded context as being for domain models as a namespace is for classes.  These contexts are spaces where a domain mo...

Image: Pixabay SOLID is a mnemonic acronym for five object-oriented design principals that are intended to make software designs more understandable (see Wikipedia ). They were promoted by a chap called Robert C Martin who has been programming since before I was born and is an authority on writing clean code.  Laravel is a PHP framework that implements the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. A lot of people think that their responsibility for OOP design ends with adopting a framework, but actually Laravel is relatively un-opinionated on your OOP design and you still need to think about writing code that is testable and maintainable.  The reason that SOLID principals matter becomes apparent when you work on a single project for a long time. If you're writing throwaway applications for clients that you never expect to work on again (presumably because the client won't hire you again) then the quality of your code doesn't matter. But if you're the guy stuck ...