Friday, September 7, 2007

Object Oriented or Still Procedural Driven?

Well, according to Chris Richardson, I am not the Object Oriented Developer that I thought I was. In his talk at SpringOne 2007, he challenged his audience to question whether they are actually doing OOD (Design / Development) or if they have carried over the habits of Procedural Programming into the Java language.

I must admit, he has made me think. Many of the points in his article reflect the types of projects that I have been on - heavy service objects full of business logic while the domain objects are basically reduced to Value Objects / Entities to persist without any business logic being in them. His argument is that this is fundamentally procedural programming brought into an Object Oriented programming language. Instead, we should have the business logic contained within the domain model (which includes both business logic and state) and the service objects that use them are a thin layer around the domain model that clients delegate to.

Overall, I think that this may be a "purist" position on OOD, and I am suspect of the claims of ease of maintainability and supportability are really true. Of course, I am speaking from the position of not having any experience with this style of programming - but I am very curious about it. Ultimately, I do believe that he is promoting the Domain Driven Design approach to software. Does anyone have any experience with Domain Driven Design? Can anyone vouch for this style of programming?