Box

Boxing everything in neat little boxes, stack them, combine them, hide them.

The goal of this project is to provide simple abstractions that avoid leaking models across boundaries and provide tools to create applications that are convenient to reason about and maintainable with a strict compatibility with existing libraries.

The main idea stems from my experience with go-kit and it inspired the majority of this project. However, over the years I noticed some things where go-kit was deviating from standard tools, and with the release generics in Go, I thought about providing a type-safe version of what go-kit taught me.

Philosophy

The basic idea is that most applications have to deal with different model layers when they interface with the outside world:

1. transport protocol - e.g. HTTP requests/responses, async message buses, gRPC, lambda trigger etc.
2. data-transfer-object (DTO) - Protocolbuffers, JSON, AVRO, database models
3. internal model - the domain model used inside of the application

For each of the models there is a distinct layer that provides conversion logic, domain specific handling and encapsulation.

Terms used in this applications to refer to the different layers are:

Layer	Model	Concerns
Transport	transport protocol	Communication patterns, status codes, meta-data extraction, error conversion
Endpoint	DTO	DTO decoding, validation & sanitisation, meta-data extraction
Service	internal model	businesss logic

A model dependency must only point inwards, such that the Service has no dependency on the DTO and the Endpoint has no dependency on the transport protocol. In the same way a Layer must not jump a layer, such that the Transport knows nothing about the internal model. In fact, the Transport can in most cases be a generic implementation that doesn't need to know anything about the underlying models and all dependencies can be injected via conversion functions. This allows sharing Transports, which provides for easier implementation of infrastructure best-practices.

Why should you separate layers?

Different Evolution Cadences

The layers have different evolution cadences and creating a lose coupling allows for easier migration and maintenance of the individual parts.

The transport is usually very slow moving, especially established protocols like HTTP. For the DTO it's not always up to you to decide on changes and coupling it strongly with the internal model can turn into month-long refactoring work.

Migration to different models

By decoupling DTO from your internal model, you can connect your service to different endpoints and transports. That is useful when the source of your information changes, e.g. by consuming from a different message bus. From experience, this happens a lot when micro-services migrate from one team to another or new major versions are introduced.

Re using infrastructure

This repository also provides a collection of Transports that can be used off-the-shelf.

Usage in services

See the strsvc for a full example.

A basic example for encapsulating your service in an endpoint and transport

import (
...
  "github.com/aws/aws-lambda-go/lambda"
  awslambdago "github.com/jan-xyz/box/transports/github.com/aws/aws-lambda-go"
...
)

func main() {
  db := database.New()
  s := service.New(db)
  ep := endpoint.New(s)
  h := awslambdago.NewAPIGatewayTransport(
    endpoint.Decode,
    endpoint.Encode,
    endpoint.EncodeError,
    ep,
  )

  lambda.StartHandlerFunc(h)
}

The above example is a lambda that is triggered by an API Gateway request. The layers could look like this:

Layer	Model
Transport	API Gateway Request & Response
Endpoint	JSON
Service	internal model

Another example could be a lambda triggered by a DynamoDB Stream

Layer	Model
Transport	DynamoDB Stream Record
Endpoint	database model
Service	internal model

or an HTTP Server with a Protobuf body

Layer	Model
Transport	HTTP Request & Response
Endpoint	protobuf model
Service	internal model

Usage for clients

For clients the same principle applies as above but from the rule that dependencies only point inwards, we can conclude that instead of wrapping the inner layers with the next outer layer, we provide clients that can deal with the internal model. That leads to thin wrappers around provided libraries like the aws-sdk or HTTP clients. The layers in this case look a bit different and I inverted the order to better represent the flow of data through them.

Layer	Model
Service	internal model
Endpoint	DTO
Transport	transport protocol

An example for an aws-sdk implementation could look like this

import (
...
  "github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/service/dynamodb"
  "github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/service/dynamodb/types"
...
)
  type dynamoDBClient interface {
    GetItem(ctx context.Context, params *dynamodb.GetItemInput, optFns ...func(*dynamodb.Options)) (*dynamodb.GetItemOutput, error)
  }

  type db struct {
    client dynamoDBClient
  }

  func New() *db {
    cfg, err := config.LoadDefaultConfig(context.TODO(), config.WithRegion("us-west-2"))
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatalf("unable to load SDK config, %v", err)
    }

    client := dynamodb.NewFromConfig(cfg)
    return &db{
      client: client, 
    }
  }

  func (d *db) GetCustomer(ctx context.Context, custmerID string) (service.Customer, error) {
    input := dynamodb.GetItemInput{
      TableName: "My-Table",
      Key: map[string]types.AttributeValue{
       "id": customerID,
      }
    }

    out, err := d.client.GetItem(ctx, input)
    if err != nil {
      return service.Customer{}, err
    }

    return dbModelToInternalModel(out)
  }

In most SDK examples you will not have to deal with the transport protocol and it is hidden inside of the SDK. In other cases you will need to provide that yourself and it makes sense to separate it in the same way. For example, the HTTP layer of a service with retries, jitter, exponential back-offs should be separated from the DTO and can be shared across many clients and even teams and companies.

Further Reading and Inspiration

1. https://jeffreypalermo.com/2008/07/the-onion-architecture-part-1/
2. https://alistair.cockburn.us/hexagonal-architecture/
3. https://gokit.io/faq/#architecture-and-design
4. https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-architecture.html
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle