Oliver Drotbohm has been a member of the Spring open-source engineering team for 15 years. His work focused on software architecture, DDD, REST, and persistence technologies. His new book, “Modulithic Applications with Spring”, is due for release in 2026.
To separate technical from domain code, architectural approaches like Hexagonal or Onion Architecture are currently all the rage. However, discussions about their semantic details and their mapping to the source code structure of software projects are at least equally ubiquitous.
How much abstraction and mapping between architectural concepts is needed? Is persistence metadata in the domain model heresy? Above all: what is the actual goal of the exercise, and: does it have to be so complicated?
We address these and other questions in a theoretical overview and by looking at concrete examples. We discuss the trade-offs of different approaches and how various tools and libraries help us to maintain the intended structural integrity.
The building blocks of tactical Domain-Driven Design (DDD) define atomic design concepts for domain models. They define semantics, rules, and guide developers on how to structure code to develop complex business logic. However, the implementation of those in Java usually leads to some technical challenges.
In this workshop, we look at different approaches and tools that support developers building rich domain models in Java: the jMolecules library, that allows expressing DDD concepts in code and that provides integration with many ubiquitous technologies like Spring, Jackson and various persistence technologies. For Spring Boot applications, the Spring Modulith project supports developers to implement business modules, the interaction among them using events, their testability and documenting them.
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