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Hexagonal Architecture

The Hexagonal Architecture, also known as the Ports and Adapters pattern, allows an application to be driven equally by users, programs, tests, and to develop and test in isolation from runtime systems. It segments an application into three main parts - the application core, primary and secondary ports and adapters. Primary ports deliver data outward from the application core, while secondary ports drive data inward. When implemented in Java and Spring, the core domain represents business rules, ports define interfaces to external systems, and adapters translate between ports and infrastructure layers for data access. This architecture promotes loose coupling and testability.

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326 views6 pages

Hexagonal Architecture

The Hexagonal Architecture, also known as the Ports and Adapters pattern, allows an application to be driven equally by users, programs, tests, and to develop and test in isolation from runtime systems. It segments an application into three main parts - the application core, primary and secondary ports and adapters. Primary ports deliver data outward from the application core, while secondary ports drive data inward. When implemented in Java and Spring, the core domain represents business rules, ports define interfaces to external systems, and adapters translate between ports and infrastructure layers for data access. This architecture promotes loose coupling and testability.

Uploaded by

Sebastian Torralba
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Hexagonal Architecture

Presentation
The Hexagonal Architecture also known as “Ports and Adapters Pattern” has a very
tricky name, that’s because it does not refer to a particular layout or scaffolding that we
have to follow for our code. Its name came from a visual reminder for what a port is
indeed, since the first computers came with several ports to connect with other devices.
These ports had a shape like a Hexagon, if you use a little imagination and be
accomplice with the author.

Here is a Serial Port and a VGA Port

When Alistair Cockburn wrote the first paper about the


pattern, he attempts to: “Allow an application to equally be
driven by users, programs, automated test or batch scripts,
and to be developed and tested in isolation from its
eventual run-time devices and databases.”

But how do we implement this in Java and don’t die trying? First
we need to understand what is a port and then what is an
adapter.

A port is an interface, on the strict meaning of the word, please


don’t think about an interface on Java. It’s an endpoint to allow
us to consume or expose information to the outside. An adapter

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is a mechanism to translate the information from a device to the
port.

Analogy

For example, a Video Card has many ports, but for now we need
to think it has a VGA port, so we bought a new monitor and it
came with only an HDMI port. Our Application is the whole
Computer and their video cards is one of his domains. The Video
Card Domain has ports to communicate with the outside
(Infrastructure), but we need an adapter to translate the analog
signal on a digital signal for the HDMI. Here comes the adapter
to allow us to connect the computer to monitor and enjoy our
games. So the video card sends the signal through a port to the
adapter, and receives the data to show on the screen. The
adapter is part of the infrastructure.

Diagrams

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So we can take these concepts and use it to start fitting into
Domain Driven Design for our project.

In a first approach of the original conception from the author,


the hexagonal architecture may be segregated in three parts, the
application, the primary ports/adapters and secondary
ports/adapters. The differences between primary and secondary
ports/adapters is that in the first one the app is driving or
delivering the data to the outside actors and the second ones
drives data from outside actors.

So we can take these concepts and use it to start fitting into


Domain Driven Design for our project.

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Now the Application is what our project exposes to the outside,
the API (Application Program Interface), here we can put our
rest api endpoints, websockets, exports data endpoints and all
stuff that we need to deliver to the front-end or other
consumers. The Domain is the core of the project and represents
the business rules and main data structures. And finally in the
infrastructure layer,The SPI (Server Provider Interface),
contains all the mechanisms that we need to consume or persist
data, such as repositories or calls to other apis.

Explanation

If we are using Spring in our project, we need to create a folder


or package for each aggregate, an aggregate is a domain concept
taken like a single unit. So we need into this folder or package,
two more, the data and services packages. The data packages
contain the class that represents data structure to be
manipulated for the services, and the service is the business
rules for our domain.

Into the services we declare a port to be instantiated by a factory


pattern with adapter that allows it to persist or consume
information. With Spring we don’t need to be worried to create
the factory for the adapters, we use the dependency injection

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provided by the framework to instantiate the adapters, the
adapter must be defined like a Component to this works fine.

Into the application package we need an Api port, in this case


the controllers for our services. Also we may need DTO (Data
Transfer Objects) to translate the request parameters to a Data
class from the domain layer. Here, may you ask for the adapters?
Where is it? The adapter is given by the framework through the
request mapping annotation. It handles client requests to the
right port method to call the service.

Finally we arrive at the infrastructure package, it contains the


entities and their repository for database persistence, the
mappers to map our data classes to entities and the adapters to
handle the data to connect to outside resources. Also there is a
config folder to place all the configuration for our project.

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Conclusion

This article is a guide showing my point of view of the Hexagonal


Architecture to implement in Java with the Spring Framework.
This Architecture can be useful to create microservices, indeed
from it came a lot of other DDD Architectures like Onion or
Clean Architecture they took the basic layout and adds their
flavours.

Thanks to my Incluit partners for the support!!

Lic. Sebastian Torralba

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