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A few years later, I saw the same end result come from a completely different process. This project was to replace an existing C++ application with a new design implemented in Java. The old application had been hacked together without any regard for object modeling. The design of the old application, if there was one, had accreted as one capability after another had been laid on top of the existing code, without any noticeable generalization or abstraction.
The eerie thing was that the end products of the two processes were very similar! Both had functionality, but were bloated, very hard to understand, and eventually unmaintainable. Though the implementations had, in places, a kind of directness, you couldn’t gain much insight about the purpose of the system by reading the code. Neither process took any advantage of the object paradigm available in their development environment, except as fancy data structures.
Models come in many varieties and serve many roles, even those restricted to the context of a software development project. Domain-driven design calls for a model that doesn’t just aid early analysis but is the very foundation of the design. This approach has some important implications for the code. What is less obvious is that domain-driven design requires a different approach to modeling. . . .
Model-Driven Design
The astrolabe, used to compute star positions, is a mechanical implementation of a model of the sky.
Tightly relating the code to an underlying model gives the code meaning and makes the model relevant.
* * *
A Medieval Sky Computer
Ancient Greek astronomers devised the astrolabe, which was perfected by medieval Islamic scientists. A rotating web (called a rete) represented the positions of the fixed stars on the celestial sphere. Interchangeable plates engraved with a local spherical coordinate system represented the views from different latitudes. Rotating the rete against the plate enabled a calculation of celestial positions for any time and day of the year. Conversely, given a stellar or solar position, the time could be calculated. The astrolabe was a mechanical implementation of an object-oriented model of the sky.
* * *
Projects that have no domain model at all, but just write code to fulfill one function after another, gain few of the advantages of knowledge crunching and communication discussed in the previous two chapters. A complex domain will swamp them.
On the other hand, many complex projects do attempt some sort of domain model, but they don’t maintain a tight connection between the model and the code. The model they develop, possibly useful as an exploratory tool at the outset, becomes increasingly irrelevant and even misleading. All the care lavished on the model provides little reassurance that the design is correct, because the two are different.
This connection can break down in many ways, but the detachment is often a conscious choice. Many design methodologies advocate an analysis model, quite distinct from the design and usually developed by different people. It is called an analysis model because it is the product of analyzing the business domain to organize its concepts without any consideration of the part it will play in a software system. An analysis model is meant as a tool for understanding only; mixing in implementation concerns is thought to muddy the waters. Later, a design is created that may have only a loose correspondence to the analysis model. The analysis model is not created with design issues in mind, and therefore it is likely to be quite impractical for those needs.
Some knowledge crunching happens during such an analysis, but most of it is lost when coding begins, when the developers are forced to come up with new abstractions for the design. Then there is no guarantee that the insights gained by the analysts and embedded in the model will be retained or rediscovered. At this point, maintaining any mapping between the design and the loosely connected model is not cost-effective.
The pure analysis model even falls short of its primary goal of understanding the domain, because crucial discoveries always emerge during the design/implementation effort. Very specific, unanticipated problems always arise. An up-front model will go into depth about some irrelevant subjects, while it overlooks some important subjects. Other subjects will be represented in ways that are not useful to the application. The result is that pure analysis models get abandoned soon after coding starts, and most of the ground has to be covered again. But the second time around, if the developers perceive analysis to be a separate process, modeling happens in a less disciplined way. If the managers perceive analysis to be a separate process, the development team may not be given adequate access to domain experts.
Whatever the cause, software that lacks a concept at the foundation of its design is, at best, a mechanism that does useful things without explaining its actions.
If the design, or some central part of it, does not map to the domain model, that model is of little value, and the correctness of the software is suspect. At the same time, complex mappings between models and design functions are difficult to understand and, in practice, impossible to maintain as the design changes. A deadly divide opens between analysis and design so that insight gained in each of those activities does not feed into the other.
An analysis must capture fundamental concepts from the domain in a comprehensible, expressive way. The design has to specify a set of components that can be constructed with the programming tools in use on the project that will perform efficiently in the target deployment environment and will correctly solve the problems posed for the application.
MODEL-DRIVEN DESIGN discards the dichotomy of analysis model and design to search out a single model that serves both purposes. Setting aside purely technical issues, each object in the design plays a conceptual role described in the model. This requires us to be more demanding of the chosen model, since it must fulfill two quite different objectives.
There are always many ways of abstracting a domain, and there are always many designs that can solve an application problem. This is what makes it practical to bind the model and design. This binding mustn’t come at the cost of a weakened analysis, fatally compromised by technical considerations. Nor can we accept clumsy designs, reflecting domain ideas but eschewing software design principles. This approach demands a model that works well as both analysis and design. When a model doesn’t seem to be practical for implementation, we must search for a new one. When a model doesn’t faithfully express the key concepts of the domain, we must search for a new one. The modeling and design process then becomes a single iterative loop.
The imperative to relate the domain model closely to the design adds one more criterion for choosing the more useful models out of the universe of possible models. It calls for hard thinking and usually takes multiple iterations and a lot of refactoring, but it makes the model relevant.
Therefore:
Design a portion of the software system to reflect the domain model in a very literal way, so that mapping is obvious. Revisit the model and modify it to be implemented more naturally in software, even as you seek to make it reflect deeper insight into the domain. Demand a single model that serves both purposes well, in addition to supporting a robust UBIQUITOUS LANGUAGE.
Draw from the model the terminology used in the design and the basic assignment of responsibilities. The code becomes an expression of the model, so a change to the code may be a change to the model. Its effect must ripple through the rest of the project’s activities accordingly.
To tie the implementation slavishly to a model usually requires software development tools and languages that support a modeling paradigm, such as object-oriented programming.
Sometimes there will be different models for different subsystems (see Chapter 14), but only one model should apply to a particular part of the system, throughout all aspects of the development effort, from the code to requirements analysis.
The single model reduces the chances of error, because the design is now a direct outgrowth of the carefully considered model. The design, and even the code itself, has the communicativeness of a model.
Modeling Paradigms and Tool Support
To make a MODEL-DRIVEN DESIGN pay off, the correspondence must be literal, exact within bounds of human error. To make such a close correspondence of model and design possible, it is almost essential to work within a modeling paradigm supported by software tools that allow you to create direct analogs to the concepts in the model.
Figure 3.1
Object-oriented programming is powerful because it is based on a modeling paradigm, and it provides implementations of the model constructs. As far as the programmer is concerned, objects really exist in memory, they have associations with other objects, they are organized into classes, and they provide behavior available by messaging. Although many developers benefit from just applying the technical capabilities of objects to organize program code, the real breakthrough of object design comes when the code expresses the concepts of a model. Java and many other tools allow the creation of objects and relationships directly analogous to conceptual object models.
Although it has never reached the mass usage that object-oriented languages have, the Prolog language is a natural fit for MODEL-DRIVEN DESIGN. In this case, the paradigm is logic, and the model is a set of logical rules and facts they operate on.
MODEL-DRIVEN DESIGN has limited applicability using languages such as C, because there is no modeling paradigm that corresponds to a purely procedural language. Those languages are procedural in the sense that the programmer tells the computer a series of steps to follow. Although the programmer may be thinking about the concepts of the domain, the program itself is a series of technical manipulations of data. The result may be useful, but the program doesn’t capture much of the meaning. Procedural languages often support complex data types that begin to correspond to more natural conceptions of the domain, but these complex types are only organized data, and they don’t capture the active aspects of the domain. The result is that software written in procedural languages has complicated functions linked together based on anticipated paths of execution, rather than by conceptual connections in the domain model.
Before I ever heard of object-oriented programming, I wrote FORTRAN programs to solve mathematical models, which is just the sort of domain in which FORTRAN excels. Mathematical functions are the main conceptual component of such a model and can be cleanly expressed in FORTRAN. Even so, there is no way to capture higher level meaning beyond the functions. Most non-mathematical domains don’t lend themselves to MODEL-DRIVEN DESIGN in procedural languages because the domains are not conceptualized as math functions or as steps in a procedure.
Object-oriented design, the paradigm that currently dominates the majority of ambitious projects, is the approach used primarily in this book.
Example: From Procedural to MODEL-DRIVEN
As discussed in Chapter 1, a printed circuit board (PCB) can be viewed as a collection of electrical conductors (called nets) connecting the pins of various components. There are often tens of thousands of nets. Special software, called a PCB layout tool, finds a physical arrangement for all the nets so that they don’t cross or interfere with each other. It does this by optimizing their paths while satisfying an enormous number of constraints placed by the human designers that restrict the way they can be laid out. Although PCB layout tools are very sophisticated, they still have some shortcomings.
One problem is that each of these thousands of nets has its own set of layout rules. PCB engineers see many nets as belonging to natural groupings that should share the same rules. For example, some nets form buses.
Figure 3.2. An explanatory diagram of buses and nets
By lumping nets into a bus, perhaps 8 or 16 or 256 at a time, the engineer cuts the job down to a more manageable size, improving productivity and reducing errors. The trouble is, the layout tool has no such concept as a bus. Rules have to be assigned to tens of thousands of nets, one net at a time.
A Mechanistic Design
Desperate engineers worked around this limitation in the layout tool by writing scripts that parse the layout tool’s data files and insert rules directly into the file, applying them to an entire bus at a time.
The layout tool stores each circuit connection in a net list file, which looks something like this:
Net Name Component.Pin
-------- -------------
Xyz0 A.0, B.0
Xyz1 A.1, B.1
Xyz2 A.2, B.2
. . .
It stores the layout rules in a file format something like this:
Net Name Rule Type Parameters
-------- --------- ----------
Xyz1 min_linewidth 5
Xyz1 max_delay 15
Xyz2 min_linewidth 5
Xyz2 max_delay 15
. . .
The engineers carefully use a naming convention for the nets so that an alphabetical sort of the data file will place the nets of a bus together in a sorted file. Then their script can parse the file and modify each net based on its bus. Actual code to parse, manipulate, and write the files is just too verbose and opaque to serve this example, so I’ll just list the steps in the procedure.
1. Sort net list file by net name.
2. Read each line in file, seeking first one that starts with bus name pattern.
3. For each line with matching name, parse line to get net name.
4. Append net name with rule text to rules file.
5. Repeat from 3 until left of line no longer matches bus name.
So the input of a bus rule such as this:
Bus Name Rule Type Parameters
-------- --------- ----------
Xyz max_vias 3
would result in adding net rules to the file like these:
Net Name Rule Type Parameters
-------- --------- ----------
. . .
Xyz0 max_vias 3
Xyz1 max_vias 3
Xyz2 max_vias 3
. . .
I imagine that the person who first wrote such a script had only this simple need, and if this were the only requirement, a script like this would make a lot of sense. But in practice, there are now dozens of scripts. They could, of course, be refactored to share sorting and string matching functions, and if the language supported function calls to encapsulate the details, the scripts could begin to read almost like the summary steps above. But still, they are just file manipulations. A different file format (and there are several) would require starting from scratch, even though the concept of grouping buses and applying rules to them is the same. If you wanted richer functionality or interactivity, you would have to pay for every inch.
What the script writers were trying to do was to supplement the tool’s domain model with the concept of “bus.” Their implementation infers the bus’s existence through sorts and string matches, but it does not explicitly deal with the concept.
A Model-Driven Design
The preceding discussion has already described the concepts the domain experts use to think about their problems. Now we need to organize those concepts explicitly into a model we can base software on.
Figure 3.3. A class diagram oriented toward efficient assignment of layout rules
With these objects implemented in an object-oriented language, the core functionality becomes almost trivial.
The assignRule() method can be implemented on Abstract Net. The assignedRules() method on Net takes its own rules and its Bus’s rules.
abstract class AbstractNet {<
br />
private Set rules;
void assignRule(LayoutRule rule) {
rules.add(rule);
}
Set assignedRules() {
return rules;
}
}
class Net extends AbstractNet {
private Bus bus;
Set assignedRules() {
Set result = new HashSet();
result.addAll(super.assignedRules());
result.addAll(bus.assignedRules());
return result;
}
}
Of course, there would be a great deal of supporting code, but this covers the basic functionality of the script.
The application requires import/export logic, which we’ll encapsulate into some simple services.
We’ll also need a few utilities:
Now, starting the application is a matter of initializing the repositories with imported data:
Collection nets = NetListImportService.read(aFile);
NetRepository.addAll(nets);
Collection buses = InferredBusFactory.groupIntoBuses(nets);
BusRepository.addAll(buses);
Each of the services and repositories can be unit-tested. Even more important, the core domain logic can be tested. Here is a unit test of the most central behavior (using the JUnit test framework):
public void testBusRuleAssignment() {
Net a0 = new Net("a0");
Net a1 = new Net("a1");
Bus a = new Bus("a"); //Bus is not conceptually dependent
a.addNet(a0); //on name-based recognition, and so
a.addNet(a1); //its tests should not be either.
NetRule minWidth4 = NetRule.create(MIN_WIDTH, 4);
a.assignRule(minWidth4);
Domain-Driven Design