I am a bit confused about how XEP-0114 works. Does servicing a domain using a component mean that the server will no longer do anything on behalf of that domain, or does it just mean that the component will ALSO be allowed to service all users on that domain.
More specifically, is it possible to have multiple components servicing the same domain? For example, one component could handle MUC, another could store all messages in a history store, and a third could handle the roster, etc... All while the XMPP server continues handling the user like it normally would - and replying to presence, iq packets, etc... What this means is that components would have to be written so that their realm doesn't intersect with each other.
Answering #dhruvbird's second question in the comments above, if you have delegated a domain to your XEP-114 component, that component is responsible for everything about that domain, including all of the presence states of the users in that domain. That is possible, if tedious, but make sure you've read the new RFC 6121 recently.
Note: most servers have a component that implements all of this presence subscription logic - it's where the real IM business logic is implemented. You'll effectively be writing a replacement for that logic, so make sure there's no other way to solve your problem first.
Related
In DDD, you're strongly encouraged to have all business logic within the domain entities instead of separate from it. Which makes sense.
You also have the idea of Domain Services to encapsulate certain pieces of logic.
What I can't work out is how to have the domain entities perform their business logic that itself depends on external services.
Take, for example, a user management system. In this there is a User domain entity, on which there are various business actions to perform. One of these is verify_email_address - which sends an email to the users email address in order to verify that it's valid.
Except that sending an email involves interactions with external services. So it seems reasonable for this logic to be encapsulated within a Domain Service that the User entity then makes use of. But how does it actually do this?
I've seen some things suggest that the User entity is constructed with references to every domain service that it needs. Which makes it quite big and bloated, and especially hard to test.
I've seen some things that suggest that you should pass in the domain service to the method that you are calling - which just feels weird. Why would someone outside of the domain entity need to pass in the EmailClient service when calling verify_email_address?
I've also then seen the suggestion that you instead pass the User entity in to the domain service, except that this seems to imply that the logic is in the domain service and not the entity.
And finally, I've seen suggestions that the entity should raise a domain event to trigger the email, which the domain service then reacts to. That means that all of the logic for whether to send the email or not - no need if it's already verified - and which email address to send it to are in the right place, and it also means that the user only needs a way to raise events and nothing more. So it feels less tightly coupled. But it also means you need a whole eventing mechanism, which is itself quite complicated.
So, am I missing something here? How can I achieve this?
(I'm working in Rust if that matters, but I don't see that it should)
What I can't work out is the best way to have the domain entities perform their business logic that itself depends on external services.
That's not your fault; the literature is a mess.
In DDD, you're strongly encouraged to have all business logic within the domain entities instead of separate from it.
That's not quite right; the common idea is that all business logic belongs within the domain layer (somewhere). But that doesn't necessarily mean that the logic must be within a domain entity.
Evans, in Chapter 5, writes:
In some cases, the clearest and most pragmatic design includes operations that do not belong to any object. Rather than force the issue, we can follow the natural contours of the problems space and include SERVICES explicitly in the model.
There are important domain operations that can't find a natural home in an ENTITY or VALUE OBJECT....
It's a very Kingdom of Nouns idea; we have code that actually does something useful, so there must be an object it can belong to.
Having a module (in the Parnas sense) in the domain layer that is responsible for the coordination of an email client and a domain entity (or for that matter, a repository) to achieve some goal is a perfectly reasonable option.
Could that module be the domain entity itself? It certainly could.
You might find, however, that coupling the management of the in-memory representation of domain information and the orchestration of a domain process that interacts with "the real world", as it were, complicates your maintenance responsibilities by introducing a heavy coupling between two distinct concepts that should instead be lightly coupled.
Clean Architecture (and the predecessors in that lineage) suggests to separate "entities" from "use cases". Ivar Jacobson's Objectory Process distinguished "entities" from "controls". So the notion of a service that is decoupled from the entity shouldn't be too alien.
Ruth Malan writes:
Design is what we do when we want to get more of what we want than we'd get by just doing it.
Finding the right design depends a lot on finding the right "what we want" for our local context (including our best guess at how this local context is going to evolve over the time window we care about).
VoiceOfUnReason has a perfectly valid answer.
I just want to boil down your question to the grits.
What I can't work out is how to have the domain entities perform their business logic that itself depends on external services.
I've also then seen the suggestion that you instead pass the User entity in to the domain service, except that this seems to imply that the logic is in the domain service and not the entity.
That's the key. All logic that belongs to domain entities should be done on domain entities. But at the same time, domain entities MUST be independent of the outside world (even other domain entities).
That's why we have domain services and application services.
Domain services are used to coordinate things between multiple entities, like transferring money between two accounts:
public class TransferService
{
IAccountRepos _repos;
public void Transfer(string fromAccountNumber, string toAccountNumber, decimal amount)
{
var account1 = _repos.Get(fromAccountNumber);
var account2 = _repos.Get(fromAccountNumber);
var money = account1.Withdraw(amount);
account2.Deposit(money);
_repos.Update(account1);
_repos.Update(account2);
}
}
That's a domain service since it's still only using the domain only.
Application services on the other hand are used to communicate over boundaries and with external services.
And it's an external service that you should create in this case. It looks similar to domain services but are at a layer over it (it can use domain services to solve its purpose).
To summarize:
Entities must be used to perform actions on themself (the easiest way is to make all setters private which forces you to add methods).
Domains services should be used as soon as two or more entities must be used to solve a problem (can even be two entities of the same type as in the example above)
Application services are used to interact with things outside the domain and can use entities and/or domain services to solve the problem.
Recently I've been trying to make my web application use separated layers.
If I understand the concept correctly I've managed to extract:
Domain layer
This is where my core domain entities, aggregate roots, value objects reside in. I'm forcing myself to have pure domain model, meaning i do not have any service definitions here. The only thing i define here is the repositories, which is actually hidden because axon framework implements that for me automatically.
Infrastructure layer
This is where the axon implements the repository definitions for my aggregates in the domain layer
Projection layer
This is where the event handlers are implemented to project the data for the read model using MongoDB to persist it. It does not know anything other than event model (plain data classes in kotlin)
Application layer
This is where the confusion starts.
Controller layer
This is where I'm implementing the GraphQL/REST controllers, this controller layer is using the command and query model, meaning it has knowledge about the Domain Layer commands as well as the Projection Layer query model.
As I've mentioned the confusion starts with the application layer, let me explain it a bit with simplified example.
Considering I want a domain model to implement Pokemon fighting logic. I need to use PokemonAPI that would provide me data of the Pokemon names stats etc, this would be an external API i would use to get some data.
Let's say that i would have domain implemented like this:
(Keep in mind that I've stretched this implementation so it forces some issues that i have in my own domain)
Pokemon {
id: ID
}
PokemonFight {
id: ID
pokemon_1: ID
pokemon_2: ID
handle(cmd: Create) {
publish(PokemonFightCreated)
}
handle(cmd: ProvidePokemonStats) {
//providing the stats for the pokemons
publish(PokemonStatsProvided)
}
handle(cmd: Start) {
//fights only when the both pokemon stats were provided
publish(PokemonsFought)
}
The flow of data between layers would be like this.
User -> [HTTP] -> Controller -> [CommandGateway] -> (Application | Domain) -> [EventGateway] -> (Application | Domain)
Let's assume that two of pokemons are created and the use case of pokemon fight is basically that when it gets created the stats are provided and then when the stats are provided the fight automatically starts.
This use case logic can be solved by using event processor or even saga.
However as you see in the PokemonFight aggregate, there is [ProvidePokemonStats] command, which basically provides their stats, however my domain do not know how to get such data, this data is provided with the PokemonAPI.
This confuses me a bit because the use case would need to be implemented on both layers, the application (so it provides the stats using the external api) and also in the domain? the domain use case would just use purely domain concepts. But shouldn't i have one place for the use cases?
If i think about it, the only purpose saga/event processor that lives in the application layer is to provide proper data to my domain, so it can continue with it's use cases. So when external API fails, i send command to the domain and then it can decide what to do.
For example i could just put every saga / event processor in the application, so when i decide to change some automation flow i exactly know what module i need to edit and where to find it.
The other confusion is where i have multiple domains, and i want to create use case that uses many of them and connects the data between them, it immediately rings in my brain that this should be application layer that would use domain APIs to control the use case, because I don't think that i should add dependency of different domain in the core one.
TL;DR
What layer should be responsible of implementing the automated process between aggregates (can be single but you know what i mean) if the process requires some external API data.
What layer should be responsible of implementing the automated process between aggregates that live in different domains / micro services.
Thank you in advance, and I'm also sorry if what I've wrote sounds confusing or it's too much of text, however any answers about layering the DDD applications and proper locations of the components i would highly appreciate.
I will try to put it clear. If you use CQRS:
In the Write Side (commands): The application services are the command handlers. A cmd handler accesses the domain (repositories, aggreagates, etc) in order to implement a use case.
If the use case needs to access data from another bounded context (microservice), it uses an infraestructure service (via dependency injection). You define the infraestructure service interface in the application service layer, and the implementation in the infra layer. The infra then access the remote microservice via http rest for example. Or integration through events.
In the Read Side (queries): The application service is the query method (I think you call it projection), which access the database directly. There's no domain here.
Hope it helps.
I do agree your wording might be a bit vague, but a couple of things do pop up in my mind which might steer you in the right direction.
Mind you, the wording makes it so that I am not 100% sure whether this is what you're looking for. If it isn't, please comment and correct my on the answer I'll provide, so I can update it accordingly.
Now, before your actual question, I'd firstly like to point out the following.
What I am guessing you're mixing is the notion of the Messages and your Domain Model belonging to the same layer. To me personally, the Messages (aka your Commands, Events and Queries) are your public API. They are the language your application speaks, so should be freely sharable with any component and/or service within your Bounded Context.
As such, any component in your 'application layer' contained in the same Bounded Context should be allowed to be aware of this public API. The one in charge of the API will be your Domain Model, that's true, but these concepts have to be shared to be able to communicate with one another.
That said, the component which will provide the states to your aggregate can be viewed from two directions I think.
It's a component that handles a specific 'Start Pokemon Match' Command. This component has the smarts to know to firstly retrieve the states prior to being able to dispatch a Create and ProvidePokemonStats command, thus ensuring it'll consistently create a working match with the stats in it by not dispatching any of both of the external stats-retrieval API fails.
Your angle in the question is to have an Event Handling Component that reacts on the creation of a Match. From here, I'd state a short-lived saga would be in place, as you'd need to deal with the fault scenario of not being able to retrieve the stats. A regular Event Handler is likely to lean to deal with this correctly.
Regardless of the two options you select, this service will deal with messages, a.k.a. your public API. As such it's within your application and not a component others will deal with directly, ever.
When it comes to your second question, I feel the some notion still holds. Two distinct applications/microservices only more so suggests your talking about two different Bounded Contexts. Certainly then a Saga would be in place to coordinate the operations between both contexts. Note that between Bounded Contexts, you want to share consciously when it comes to the public API, as you'd ideally not expose everything to the outside world.
Hope this helps you out and if not, like I said, please comment and provide me guidance how to answer your question properly.
I find it difficult to decide whether something should be part of domain or application.
Reading through this answer helps a lot with concepts like authorisation but I still find myself struggling with other things.
To illustrate my confusion please consider a case of comment posting. Here are the things that need to happen before a comment can be posted. I indicate in parenthesis where I think this functionality should go.
Make sure user role/status is allowed to comment on this post (authorisation, goes to Application)
Make sure post to which we are commenting exists and is published (Domain)
Make sure user has not posted more than 5 comments in the last minute (throttling, intuition says it goes to Application)
Make sure comment is not an empty string (Domain)
Make sure comment does not have dirty words (Domain?)
Make sure comment does not have duplicates from same user in this post (Domain?)
Format the comment (Application)
Remove certain HTML tags from comment that are not permitted for current user (Application)
Check comment for spam (Application?)
I can't decide whether checking comment for spam is domain concern or application, same goes for throttling. From my point of view both of these concerns are important for me and must be present. But same goes for authorisation and we know that it should not be in Domain.
If I split these concerns between a domain service and application service then I feel like my domain is not completely enforced and actually relies on application to make prior checks. In that case what is the whole point, why don't I just do it all in application to reduce confusion?
My current setup does this:
Controller ->
App.CommentingService.Comment() ->
Domain.CommentingService.Comment()
It would be helpful if someone could go through all the required steps to create a comment and assign it to the right layer giving some reasoning behind.
Your setup looks right. Application services often comes in 2 flavours:
Application features: Email notifications, Authorization, Persistence, etc. All the features, besides the domain, your system has comes here.
Application coordination: To meet a use case you need coordinate Application features and Domain. All the plumbing comes here.
Keep in mind that Application coordination models use cases so not always match 1 app service = 1 domain service because use case could involve more than 1 process.
Controller
App.CommentingService.Comment() //coordination of below features and domain
App.AuthService().Autorize(); //feature
Domain.CommentingService.Comment(); //domain
App.PersistenceService().Persist(); //feature
App.NotificationService().SentNotificationToUser(); //feature
Why don't I just do it all in application to reduce confusion?
Resposibility segregation, loose coupling, dependency inyection, etc; all of this are good for many reasons. I will give you a real example I was involved recently: Having a loose couple assembly (it was in .NET framework) with just Domain services allows me to host the same Domain untouched in a Web app, a DesktopApp and a SOAP Web Service just changing the App coordination services because requirements and use cases are different on each app.
About what goes into domain and what not. It is very hard to give you a direct answer because it depends a lot of what is your domain or not.
i.e.
Make sure user has not posted more than 5 comments in the last minute
You have to question why are you throttling? To prevent a messy UI? Performance reason? Prevent Denial of service threat? Or is breaking a rule in your "game" because your "game" just gives limited tries to the user in a time spam? This is what indicates when something is Domain or Application.
Despite having studied Domain Driven Design for a long time now there are still some basics that I simply figure out.
It seems that every time I try to design a rich domain layer, I still need a lot of Domain Services or a thick Application Layer, and I end up with a bunch of near-anemic domain entities with no real logic in them, apart from "GetTotalAmount" and the like. The key issue is that entities aren't aware of external stuff, and it's bad practice to inject anything into entities.
Let me give some examples:
1. A user signs up for a service. The user is persisted in the database, a file is generated and saved (needed for the user account), and a confirmation email is sent.
The example with the confirmation email has been discussed heavily in other threads, but with no real conclusion. Some suggest putting the logic in an application service that gets an EmailService and FileService injected from the infrastructure layer. But then I would have business logic outside of the domain, right? Others suggest creating a domain service that gets the infrastructure services injected - but in that case I would need to have the interfaces of the infrastructure services inside the domain layer (IEmailService and IFileService) which doesn't look too good either (because the domain layer cannot reference the infrastructure layer). And others suggest implementing Udi Dahan's Domain Events and then having the EmailService and FileService subscribe to those events. But that seems like a very loose implementation - and what happens if the services fail? Please let me know what you think is the right solution here.
2. A song is purchased from a digital music store. The shopping cart is emptied. The purchase is persisted. The payment service is called. An email confirmation is sent.
Ok, this might be related to the first example. The question here is, who is responsible for orchestrating this transaction? Of course I could put everything in the MVC controller with injected services. But if I want real DDD all business logic should be in the domain. But which entity should have the "Purchase" method? Song.Purchase()? Order.Purchase()? OrderProcessor.Purchase() (domain service)? ShoppingCartService.Purchase() (application service?)
This is a case where I think it's very hard to use real business logic inside the domain entities. If it's not good practice to inject anything into the entities, how can they ever do other stuff than checking its own (and its aggregate's) state?
I hope these examples are clear enough to show the issues I'm dealing with.
Dimitry's answer points out some good things to look for. Often/easily you find yourself in your scenario, with a data shoveling from db up to GUI through different layers.
I have been inspired by Jimmy Nilsson's simple advice "Value objects, Value objects and more Value objects". Often people tend to focus to much on Nouns and model them as entity. Naturally you often having trouble in finding DDD behavior. Verbs are easier to associate with behavior. A good thing is to make these Verbs appear in your domain as Value objects.
Some guidance I use for my self when trying to develop the domain (must say that it takes time to construct a rich domain, often several refactoring iterations...) :
Minimize properties (get/set)
Use value objects as much as you can
Expose as little you can. Make you domain aggregates methods intuitive.
Don't forget that your Domain can be rich by doing Validation. It's only your domain that knows how to conduct a purchase, and what's required.
Your domain should also be responsible for validation when your entities make a transition from one state two another state (work flow validations).
I'll give you some examples:
Here is a article I wrote on my blog regarding your issue about anemic Domain http://magnusbackeus.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/preventing-anemic-domain-model-where-is-my-model-behaviour/
I can also really recommend Jimmy Bogard's blog article about entity validations and using Validator pattern together with extension methods. It gives you the freedom to validate infrastructural things without making your domain dirty:
http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2007/10/24/entity-validation-with-visitors-and-extension-methods/
I use Udi's Domain Events with great success. You can also make them asynchronous if you believe your service can fail. You also wrap it in a transaction (using NServiceBus framework).
In your first example (just brainstorming now to get our minds thinking more of value objects).
Your MusicService.AddSubscriber(User newUser) application service get a call from a presenter/controller/WCF with a new User.
The service already got IUserRepository and IMusicServiceRepository injected into ctor.
The music service "Spotify" is loaded through IMusicServiceRepository
entity musicService.SignUp(MusicServiceSubscriber newSubsriber) method takes a Value object MusicServiceSubscriber.
This Value object must take User and other mandatory objects in ctor
(value objects are immutable). Here you can also place logic/behavior like handle subscriptionId's etc.
What SignUp method also does, it fires a Domain Event NewSubscriberAddedToMusicService.
It get caught by EventHandler HandleNewSubscriberAddedToMusicServiceEvent which got IFileService and IEmailService injected into it's ctor. This handler's implementation is located in Application Service layer BUT the event is controlled by Domain and MusicService.SignUp. This means the Domain is in control. Eventhandler creates file and sends email.
You can persist the user through eventhandler OR make the MusicService.AddSubscriber(...) method to this. Both will do this through IUserRepository but It's a matter of taste and perhaps how it will reflect the actual domain.
Finally... I hope you grasp something of the above... anyhow. Most important is to start adding "Verbs" methods to entitys and making the collaborate. You can also have object in your domain that are not persisted, they are only there for mediate between several domain entities and can host algorithms etc.
A user signs up for a service. The user is persisted in the
database, a file is generated and saved (needed for the user account),
and a confirmation email is sent.
You can apply Dependency Inversion Principle here. Define a domain interface like this:
void ICanSendConfirmationEmail(EmailAddress address, ...)
or
void ICanNotifyUserOfSuccessfulRegistration(EmailAddress address, ...)
Interface can be used by other domain classes. Implement this interface in infrastructure layer, using real SMTP classes. Inject this implementation on application startup. This way you stated business intent in domain code and your domain logic does not have direct reference to SMTP infrastructure. The key here is the name of the interface, it should be based on Ubiquitous Language.
A song is purchased from a digital music store. The shopping cart
is emptied. The purchase is persisted. The payment service is called.
An email confirmation is sent. Ok, this might be related to the first example. The question here is, who is responsible for orchestrating this transaction?
Use OOP best practices to assign responsibilities (GRASP and SOLID). Unit testing and refactoring will give you a design feedback. Orchestration itself can be part of thin Application Layer. From DDD Layered Architecture:
Application Layer: Defines the jobs the software is supposed to do and directs the
expressive domain objects to work out problems. The tasks this layer
is responsible for are meaningful to the business or necessary for
interaction with the application layers of other systems.
This layer is kept thin. It does not contain business rules or
knowledge, but only coordinates tasks and delegates work to
collaborations of domain objects in the next layer down. It does not
have state reflecting the business situation, but it can have state
that reflects the progress of a task for the user or the program.
Big part of you requests are related to object oriented design and responsibility assignment, you can think of GRASP Patterns and This, you can benefit from object oriented design books, recommend the following
Applying UML and Patterns
I have a SOA which makes heavy use of nonces (i.e, one-time one-use security tokens).
My app takes a nonce from a client, verifies it, then sends a new nonce back to said client as part of every reply. Also included in each reply are the results of business logic operations that executed right after the nonce was authenticated.
The nonce verification and generation are operationally coupled with the business logic, since both occur in response to every client request. However I don't want the two to be coupled in code. What's the right way to partition them in accordance with SOA principles? Is it too much to break the security and business logic into two separate services, with one calling the other as part of each reply to each client request?
Yes it makes sense to separate them. But I don't think they should have awareness of each other at all (Call each other directly).
I'll dive into a specific example and technology of how something similar is implemented.
In the web frame work Struts2 all incoming requests pass through a stack of operations(called interceptors) before arriving at a user defined object (called an action). The action then will access the business tier.
When submitting a web form there is the issue of double submission. So one way to protect against this is with a token that is sent along with the form submission. So we need to create a unique token place it as a hidden field, and then when we receive the request only process it if the token is good. This prevent users from doing something like accidentally buying something more than once.
In Struts2 there is a special server side token tag which creates the hidden field for us. So there is something that needs to be done for each form. The token interceptor if active will enforce that this value always exists and is good when receiving the form and will redirect responses that do not somewhere else.
The idea of implementing a nonces interceptor/filter that checks that the incoming nonce value is good and for responses adds the correct nonces value to the response should be completely independent of the business logic.
The example here is with html forms but adding an interceptor(or whatever you call "that which handles cross cutting concerns at the request/response level" for your appropriate technology) which adds such a value to json or xml messages should be pretty easy and likely produce the most elegant result.
The following is a link to struts2 interceptor reference (it might clarify the idea better):
http://struts.apache.org/2.2.1.1/docs/interceptors.html
The following two links are both interceptors which manage tokens:
http://struts.apache.org/2.2.1.1/docs/token-interceptor.html
http://struts.apache.org/2.2.1.1/docs/token-session-interceptor.html
I expect only the first few paragraphs of each link will be useful but something like it for your technology should be nice.
I think what you outlined above would be in keeping with SOA principles. You're keeping two distinct sets of operations separated - once service has the business logic, the other has the security logic.
This would be especially true if you have (or the potential of having) other services that would rely on nonces.