In a complete Java EE application that's clustered is the DTO pattern still a valid option? The application in question uses EJBs Hibernate and Struts with Spring etc. Is there anything wrong with transferring domain objects in such a scenario?
EDIT: Just to clarify my question, with modern day resources and improvements in Java EE is there a reason not to just use domain objects? If there is not then isn't DTO pattern sort of fading out and shouldn't be used in new applications?
Is not deprecated. It depends on the application architecture if the DTO pattern should be used or not. For example, when you develop Web Services (using JAX-WS or JAX-RS), you should send DTO's over your web methods so a C# or Python client application may consume it, and your web method should not return an object which class has Hibernate annotations, remember than in other languages the Entity won´t be created with those annotations or other business logic inside.
EDIT (Based in your comment): That depends on the software architecture. For example, I'm working on a SOA project and we use DTO's for the Services Layer and the Presentation Layer. More deeper inside, we even use DTO's to handle database communication inside the services, we use only SP's to communicate with DB, so no Hibernate or any other ORM tools can work there, we could use Spring DAO and that framework uses DTO's too. You can find lots of DTO pattern in many applications nowadays.
More info that would be great for this question:
Difference between DTO, VO, POJO, JavaBeans? (where basically, any DTO is a POJO).
Core J2EE Patterns - Transfer Object
EDIT 2: Another source of information that will explain the main reason for using DTO's design, explained by Martin Fowler
LocalDTO
Conclusion: DTO's are not an anti pattern. DTO's are meant to be used only when you need to pass data from one subsystem to another and they don't have a default or standar way to communicate.
It is a very useful pattern in Java EE.
I use a DTO to transfer related entity objects from EJB beans to the UI layer. The entity objects are fetched from DB in one transaction (see TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRED) and stored in the DTO object. The DTO is consumed in the UI layer.
A pattern is pure design. There is no "deprecation" of pattern, but less usage over time (or over-usage).
Personally, I don't see why not to use DTOs.
For example - at oVirt open source project we have entities representing business logic entities in the domain of Virtualization.
These entities should be either annotated by Hibernate annotations (actually, they are today, as we started working on hibernate POCs) and serve as the DTOs , and then have clean from annotations objects that will mapped to them (let's say, using dozer framework) and used by client
(I don't like have at client side code with unnecessary annotations), or the entities should serve as the client objects (value objects) passed to the client and we should have other classes serve as the DTO entities
The minus in the above approach is that you might have 2 parallel class diagrams - one for DTOs and one for value objects (that are used by clients) - but , in many cases in design , there is a trade-off.
You must understand the advantages and disadvantages and pick what is best for you (In our case, since the client side is GWT, it will be easier for us to go for separation to two class hierarchies, one that is DTO/server side and can be also annotated with more server side only annotations, and the other sent to the GWT client code).
Related
JHipster is great. It, however, models all objects as domain entity objects. An enum class, for example, is treated as a domain class. If I want to practice the domain driven design, I need to convert some of entity classes, which are generated by JHipster, to value classes along with other types of changes such as replacing primitive types with domain object data types. Can I still run import-jdl after making such changes? In the other words, whether the changes are maintiable with a JDL?
BTW, there is a good talk on DDD by Edson Yanaga posted on youtube.
An interesting talk about DDD:
Implementing DDD with the Spring Ecosystem by Michael Plöd # Spring I/O 2018
There's a concept coming from the video, that I've found very important:
JPA entities are not domain entities.
JPA entities and repositories are what you use to persist data on the Db. While the Domain is what you use inside the application.
To answer, I think that you can build your domain classes separately, without caring too much about JPA entities. I suppose that's better to have a consolidated JPA layer before to start building the Domain side, if the two are somehow linked (and usually they are)
Please consider that I've just started to study this topic. Would be good to hear other opinions.
It's a pity that, in short, JHipster just does not support Value Objects, which makes it incomplete to design a DDD application by only caring about models.
See
issue1,issue2,another SO question
I am developing a spring restful application that uses hibernate. I am coming across scenarios where i had to place jackson json annotations on entity getters. Ex: One to Many mappings.
Is it a good idea to place jackson json annotations on hibernate entities? Or should i go with DTO pattern to pass data that is just needed by UI? I may end up creating a DTO for every entity.
Below is the application architecture. Common is at root level. DAO has dependency on Common and so on.
Common <- DAO <- Services <- Web
DAO has entities
Services or Web can have DTO's
Please let me know your thoughts or suggestions.
Disclaimer: I am speaking from opinion and experience here
Separate dto and entities are common practice. What you choose to do really depends on it's use. One of the drawbacks of adding DTO annotations on your data model entities is versioning. Versioning becomes hard when your data model is tied to your contract. If your webservice is only used by a consumer you own and its deploy schedule is the same then it's probably not worth separating dto/entities. If you don't need versioning and you mostly have CRUD web services then you may want to look into spring data rest.
If you arn't so lucky, and have multiple consumers, then you may want to think through a few version breaking changes and how you will handle it. This will help you see the value in separating the data and contract.
I have the following scenario:
A JAX-RS Webservice that is responsable for the business logic and database interactions.
A webapp that will be used by the end users.
A webapp that will be used by administrators.
My problem is that I want to reuse the entities from the webservice on the other apps, but it is highly wrapped with frameworks like JPA, JAX-RS, CDI, among others... So I am having a hard time to isolate them. What I want is to know the best workaround and why should I use it instead of others.
Maybe DTO is the way to go (with support from some object mapper library like Dozer)
Please take a look at following article for more details: http://zezutom.blogspot.com/2012/02/thoughts-on-data-transfer-objects.html
Write you entity objects as Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs), with proper constructors, setters, etc. Apply the annotations that allow the JPA to persist them and do the object to relational mapping in such a way that, if those annotations were all stripped away you could still create and manipulate those objects fully, using the public methods of the class. It can be helpful if you create the POJO first, then add the annotations afterwards.
As the POJOs stand alone they are not at all part of your repository layer. You can use them without using the JPA at all.
I've been doing some reading lately and one thing that I've come across was this article about the Anaemic Domain Model from Martin Fowler. I know, it's old, but somehow very actual in Java world. So I'm trying to move towards a more domain-driven design. One option would be to go with the Active Record model. However, I don't really like the current implementation it has in Scala. It completely couples the domain objects with the persistence type (not so bad in most cases but I have a project where I need to store something both in a RDB and in Mongo). Then I ran across this article about Spring, Hibernate and Scala and though here too the domain object is coupled with the JPA trait, I noticed how he uses Spring to inject a Notification Service. Can't the same mechanism be used to inject a transparent DAO interface? Have you seen this used anywhere? Any thoughts on the idea?
You should have a look at Spring-Data, this project provides some kind of abstraction over different data storages.
I'm looking for a comprehensive setup that you've successfully used already. I've already loads of hints as to what building bricks I might use, but I'm not sure how to put it all together. Tools that need to be bought are OK, too.
Details:
I'm developing a Flex front end client for a Java server application and I have a set of model classes that represent objects in my business logic and should have the same properties and exhibit the same behaviour throughout all layers. These objects
have form validation logic for user input
are displayed in various forms (lists, detail views ...) throughout the UI
are retrieved from and sent to the server using XML or AMF
are validated again on the server
are stored in a RDBM with tables and fields corresponding to the classes and fields
This is a very common application structure, I guess. I'm already using:
ORM for the Java backend (Eclipse persistency package)
automatic mapping from XML to Action Script, using XML schema and the classes in mx.rpc.xml, as described here.
Now, what I'd really like to do is define the objects once (I already have them in XSD) and have tools set up class stubs for the whole chain. What can I use?
I've already heard of (but not evaluated):
XMLBeans to generate Java classes from XML Schema
Granite DS to generate AS classes from Java classes
I don't think your Flex UI should know or care about Java objects.
Take a "contract first", XML schema-drive approach and come up with the messages that you need to exchange between the Flex client and your service tier. Once you have that in place, the two are completely decoupled. That's a good start.
I'd also recommend not buying into a generation scheme. You'll only have to pay that price once during development.
I'm a Spring user, so I'd recommend Spring's "contract first" web services, using the Spring OXM interfaces. That will keep your UI and service tiers nicely decoupled. Use the org.springframework.oxm interfaces to do your mappings.
You can use Spring/BlazeDS to integrate your Flex UI with the Spring back end.
You have the full power of Spring IoC and AOP to create the back end.
I think you'll find it's a good approach for this problem.