DCI and DDD

[Rafael Luque]

Hi all,

I'm learning James Coplien et. al. book "Lean Architecture" and I find very interesting its comparison of the DCI architecture vs the "atomic event" architecture from the good, old-fashion object-oriented programming. Th to e books shows MCV-U and DCI as complementary means to represent the end user's mental model.u

I was wondering how DCI and DDD compares and if they could be complementary concepts between them.

Thank you!

[Thomas Schanko]

Hi Rafael,

from my experience both are not mutual exclusive, even if their protagonists pretend they are. Over the last three years I found a couple of sceanarios where applying the DCI mindset to a DDD codebase helped a lot in terms of communicating intention and keeping the code clean and crisp. As imho DDD somehow lacks a concept for describing interaction (whether between aggregates or bounded contexts), a little bit of DCI sometimes helps to clean up the event driven mess in a distributed system. However, it seems that doing things like that and talking about it bears a great risk of beeing acused to be a heretic from both sides;-)
A deeper dive into those ancient discussions about DDD and DCI (here and over at object-composition group) is definately worth the time. There is no silver bullet, unless you find one...

Thomas