Understanding Hexagonal Architecture
You might have heard of term called hexagonal architecture, if you’re a software developer, which is also known as ports and adapters architecture / pattern. This is a popular architecture style in modern software development because it provided multiple benefits in you design, like creating flexible, modular, and maintainable system that can evolve over the time.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at hexagonal architecture and explore its key principles, benefits, and implementation strategies.
What is Hexagonal Architecture?
Hexagonal architecture
It is a software design pattern that aims to isolate the core business logic of an application from the surrounding infrastructure and technologies. It accomplishes this by dividing the application into distinct layers or hexagons, with each hexagon representing a specific responsibility or concern.
The core of your application resides at the center of the hexagon, covered by the ports, which are nothing but interfaces though which the application will communicate with external system or services. The adapter connects the ports to the infra and technologies used to implement them eventually.
The key idea behind hexagonal architecture is to create a clear separation of concerns between the application’s core logic and the external dependencies. This separation makes the application more flexible, adaptable, and testable.
Benefits of Hexagonal Architecture
Hexagonal architecture offers several benefits for software development teams, including:
- Modularity: The hexagonal architecture encourages modular design, making it easy to add, remove, or replace components without affecting the rest of the system.
- Flexibility: The clear separation of concerns makes it easy to adapt the system to changing requirements or technologies.
- Testability: Hexagonal architecture makes it easy to test each component in isolation, ensuring that the system behaves correctly as a whole.
- Maintainability: Hexagonal architecture promotes code quality and maintainability by making it easier to identify and isolate bugs or issues.
Implementing Hexagonal Architecture
Implementing hexagonal architecture involves dividing the application into three main layers:
- The domain layer,
- The application layer,
- and the infrastructure / repository layer.
The domain layer contains the core business logic of the application, independent of any external dependencies. The application layer contains the use cases or application-specific logic that interacts with the domain layer via interfaces or ports. The infrastructure layer contains the adapters that connect the ports to the external systems or services.
Before implementing hexagonal pattern, fist identify the core domain logic of your system and defining the interfaces or also called ports for them, they needs to communicate with external system or identify them carefully. Then, implement the adapters that connect the ports to the infrastructure layer.
It’s important to keep the interfaces or ports separate from the adapters to ensure that changes in the infrastructure do not affect the core domain logic. Additionally, make sure that the interfaces or ports are defined in a technology-agnostic way to promote flexibility and adaptability.
Resources —
Go here look out for project examples, to understand the implementation better.
