Over the last several years we’ve seen a whole range of ideas regarding the architecture of systems. These include:
- Hexagonal Architecture (a.k.a. Ports and Adapters) by Alistair Cockburn and adopted by Steve Freeman, and Nat Pryce in their wonderful book Growing Object Oriented Software
- Onion Architecture by Jeffrey Palermo
- Screaming Architecture from a blog of mine last year
- DCI from James Coplien, and Trygve Reenskaug.
- BCE by Ivar Jacobson from his book Object Oriented Software Engineering: A Use-Case Driven Approach
Though these architectures all vary somewhat in their details, they are very similar. They all have the same objective, which is the separation of concerns. They all achieve this separation by dividing the software into layers. Each has at least one layer for business rules, and another for interfaces.
