Many of the ideas I discuss in this series originated in discussions many years back with two good friends excellent software engineers, Andrew Tolopko and Armen Yampolsky. I am grateful to Armen and Andrew for sparking many different avenues of critical thought regarding JPA, Hibernate, and Domain Driven Design. I would also like to thank Andrew for introducing me to Domain Driven Design in the first place, back in 2005 or so.
Thanks goes to Eric Evans for initially developing the concepts of Domain Driven Design, and presenting them in a book by that same name. This is really a wonderful book that has profoundly changed my way of thinking about software engineering like few other resources have. It was a bit of a challenging book for me on first read, mainly because the ideas he presents were so counter to the ways I typically thought about software engineering. Like many of the best programming books I've read, I didn't really grasp everything the first time through, and I read it a second time in short order. I've read this book three times now, and often re-read sections of it when working on particular problems or challenges. While this book is a little difficult to get through, I highly recommend you give it a read, and keep a copy on your shelf. It's worth the investment.
I would also like to thank Vaughn Vernon for his excellent book, Implementing Domain Driven Design, and for advancing the field of DDD into areas such as CQRS and event-driven architecture. His book provides specific programming and architectural patterns for applying DDD using a variety of technologies, including JPA, and has influenced my thinking here a good deal.
Thanks to the developers of Java, Spring, and Hibernate, for providing a great back-end developer stack that gave me so many employment opportunities over the years. In hindsight, it is easy to focus on all the limitations of this stack, and to overlook it's power and all the ways that it was so innovative for its time. Thanks to Scala and MongoDB for helping the software world take that next step forward.
Thanks to StarUML for helping me produce all the pretty UML diagrams found in this series. Also, thanks to Blogger for providing me with a platform to write and share my work.
Finally, I'd like to thank my family, Josie, Jamey, and especially Shu, for being so supportive of me while I worked through this series. They've been very gracious and patient as I've stolen moments from here or there, and disappeared for brief spells on Sunday nights to post.
