The Boundary Layer

Todo

flesh out

Designing good DTOs

DTOs have no business logic. Think of them as language constructs around simple requests not dependent of any protocol.

In our Go program, the naming convention is to have a service “Foobar” (in caps, can be a pluralized noun), and have it in service/foobar.go, and its request and response models are all in service/requests/foobar.go and service/responses/foobar.go.

Though these interfaces are named similarly, in Go, we refer to these types as requests.FindGopher, hence it is never ambiguous as to what the structures are. The requests (or responses) packages contain only structures like these, hence there will never be any confusion between the two.

In other languages, you would usually have a suffix of some sorts or use a namespace explicitly to avoid repetition.

Wrapping up

The service layer is the common language of the application architecture. When the API and core speak to each other, they do so via an abstract boundary. They use DTOs (data transfer objects), simple structures of data, for communication. We now move on to the core layer of the architecture.