Reactive domain-driven design: From implicit blocking to explicit concurrency

Description

Quoting an old friend from Germany when there was still an East, and a brilliant technical leader, our history with object-oriented software development is boiled down in two sentences: “If you are going to be dumb you are going to have to be tough” and “even a blind chicken finds corn now and then.” Really, it’s difficult to expect anything else from “no architecture and no design.” The archived log of software failures over decades, including multiple clients who once ruled by innovation but are now stuck and subject to a slow death in the mud.

Vaughn Vernon enumerates common pitfalls of the industry, including Fortune clients that have failed by the misuse of objects. Failure isn’t always measured in current revenues, but by the inability to innovate, iterate, and rapidly produce software value increments. The atrophy is an unrecognized or nearly unchangeable prelude to eventual death, quickened by fast-moving startups. Pre-existing systems on which the empires were built have become tangled and brittle, inherently squandering CPU cores, operating at an embarrassingly sedate pace, with transactional throughput per second in the teens. The worst outcomes include lost data and inconsistent data caused by failed dependency compensations. Object-oriented misuse, the “design is dead” buy-in, along with accidental complexity and an obsession with complexity leading to its intentional existence, has caused extensive damage.

Architecture matters and design matters.

You must first understand the flaws, pitfalls, and failings through several real-world case studies, then you can more readily recognize what to avoid and what viable course corrections can be made. Vaughn emphasizes sound design of new services and refactoring existing legacy systems toward extended life and eventual support of new innovations. You’ll learn how the inventor of object-oriented intended it to be used, and how reactive DDD leads to explicit, coherent message sending that employs simple, business-centric, concurrent objects, including concrete example scenarios, illustrated architectures, and source code.