hexagonal architecture in go without the ceremony

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

every go web app i wrote before this one had The Struct. you know the one. it starts life innocent — three fields, a name, an id — and then someone needs to persist it, so it grows a gorm:"primaryKey" tag. then it needs to go over the wire, so it grows a json:"id" tag. then a binding:"required" for the request validation, because why not. six months later that struct imports your orm, your web framework, and your validation library, and it has a method called BeforeSave that quietly does business logic inside a database hook.

that struct knows too much. it can’t be tested without a database. it can’t be reasoned about without opening four dependencies. and every time you change your database, your json api changes too, because they’re the same forty lines of code wearing three different hats.

hexagonal on krtffl.dev

hexagonal architecture in go without the ceremony