Authors:
Stefan Kapferer
and
Olaf Zimmermann
Affiliation:
University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland (HSR FHO), Oberseestrasse 10, 8640 Rapperswil, Switzerland
Keyword(s):
DSL, Enterprise Application Integration, Model-driven Software Engineering, Service Design, Patterns.
Abstract:
Service-oriented architectures and microservices have gained much attention in recent years; companies adopt these concepts and supporting technologies in order to increase agility, scalability, and maintainability of their systems. Decomposing an application into multiple independently deployable, appropriately sized services and then integrating such services is challenging. With strategic patterns such as Bounded Context and Context Map, Domain-driven Design (DDD) can support business analysts, (enterprise) architects, and microservice adopters. However, existing architecture description languages do not support the strategic DDD patterns sufficiently; modeling tools for DDD primarily focus on its tactical patterns. As a consequence, different opinions on how to apply strategic DDD exist, and it is not clear how to combine its patterns. Aiming for a clear and concise interpretation of the patterns and their combinations, this paper distills a meta-model of selected strategic DDD p
atterns from the literature. It then introduces Context Mapper, an open source project that a) defines a Domain-specific Language (DSL) expressing the strategic DDD patterns and b) provides editing, validation, and transformation tools for this DSL. As a machine-readable description of DDD, the DSL provides a modeling foundation for (micro-)service design and integration. The models can be refactored and transformed within an envisioned tool chain supporting the continuous specification and evolution of Context Maps. Our validation activities (prototyping, action research, and case studies) suggest that the DDD pattern clarification in our meta-model and the Context Mapper tool indeed can benefit the target audience.
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