Customer Reviews

Domain-Driven Design Using Naked Objects (Pragmatic Programmers)

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While Domain-Driven Design is a large and sometimes complex topic, there are a few key principles that help us grasp its important theme: (1) Focus on the core domain; (2) Explore models in a creative collaboration with domain practitioners and software practitioners; (3) Speak a Ubiquitous Language in an explicitly Bounded Context. I believe that Dan's book, while addressing all three of these principles, speaks most prominently to the second. The more experimental models we can explore with team members--domain experts/practitioners and software practitioners--in a shorter period of time, the better design the team will achieve. Dan has shown how Naked Objects can help teams achieve high throughput on model exploration by rapidly prototyping the core domain. Even if you are not considering the use of Naked Objects as a final platform for your application, it should be considered as a viable means for prototyping its core domain. Dan's instruction through this book is probably the next best thing to having Dan visit your team on site. Also this book contains one of the rare references to practical use of the "other half" of Evan's pattern language: Strategic Design. If you need to understand how to use multiple, separate Bounded Contexts in a single application, see Chapter 17.

Those who don't have time to wade through a lot of theory will appreciate the way Dan gets to the point. Although you will need to reference Evan's book to fully understand the Domain-Driven Design pattern language, I grade Dan highly for bridging pattern concepts to implementation framework without straying off the goal of rapid development.

In the spirit of full disclosure, while I have neither worked with Dan nor supported the Naked Objects project, I have appreciated many of Dan's valuable insights on the domain-driven design Yahoo! group. Dan and I have exchanged ideas and I highly respect his efforts to accelerate the implementation of domain-driven designs. It is an important and necessary contribution to the Domain-Driven Design community.

Programming libraries will find plenty to value in Domain-Driven Design Using Naked Objects, a survey focusing on business logical and domain applications. The idea is to write just the domain objects and let the rest of the application work: this provides tools for programmers to represent domains as plain Java objects within a Naked Objects framework, which automatically renders domain objects for rich or HTML applications.

This book is an excellent way to get to know the Naked Objects framework and understand domain-driven design. This framework has really matured in the last couple of years and it is at the point where you can take advantage of it's prototyping capabilities and save significant time on developing applications. The starobjects frameworks that plug into the framework are pretty impressive, and as the JPA objects framework matures, this is going to be one amazing way to rapidly build applications. I can't wait to see where this framework goes next.

Even before Eric Evans' book had been written on the same topic I had toyed with Naked Objects years ago. What Dan has been able to do is use the easy-to-learn Naked Objects Framework to provide a masterful exposition on DDD. Clearly Naked Objects has matured since the early days and Dan points out how useful a tool it has become when development follows DDD principals. Great book. I keep going back to it time and again such as for the patterns discussions.