This text is part of a series of texts about Clean Architecture analysis applied with different frameworks and languages.
The purposes of this tex...
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I don't find this "clean" at all. I find it remarkably annoying. And it's everywhere.
When I work on an app, I don't generally work on all the components, or all the hooks, or all the routes. I work on FEATURES.
The best way to organize an app, especially a front end app, is by FEATURE. If I have, for example, a profile page, then I have a
Profilefolder and I have everything to do with that feature in that folder: routes, api calls, tests, storybook, CSS, components that are unique to that FEATURE, etc.If I have shared components, then I put them in a
sharedfolder no higher than the node at which the branches that use that component meet. Ditto for utility functions.This way, I have everything right where I need it when I'm working on a FEATURE. Isn't that what most devs work on? My application's folder hierarchy follows the nesting of the components in the app. If a component is used only by another component, then it is in its parent component's folder: right where you'd expect it to be.
And if the feature needs to be moved, I just move the folder and change the references (which VSCode does for me automatically). If I delete it, I delete everything and I only have to find the references to it (e.g., a route in a router). I don't have to search through dozens of folders and files to find all the pieces.
I explained this as part of a discussion on micro-apps here: Micro-app file/folder hierarchy.
If only more devs would try this, I think they'd like it. Think about how the code ought to be organized (loosely-coupled features) rather than some arbitrary taxonomy of file types.
I suspect that the system recommended in this article, which is, frankly, ubiquitous, is the result of too many back end devs trying to do front end architecture and just using what they know. The client side deserves better.
I agree 10000% with you.
The way you said it is a much more practical way of organizing projects on the frontend.
The clean arc works great on the backend, but it stops there.
While it's good for a frontend to be inspired by backend architectures, it needs to be clear about what works and what doesn't and needs adaptation.
Hi Charles, sorry I disagree.
I am this "back end guy" you are talking about, and yes we want to bring back end best practices to the front end. Since the practices we see in the front end are not convincing to us, sorry...
The feature based approach, yes I have also seen it many times, has the general flows of:
countless self repetition, and no chance to handle on problem in a central way
It might work for a small team, but once you have 5 people working on the code base, there is no way to easily find any logic that is already written by others. Instead of knowing that my service for my business object will exist and I am centralizing all my logic there, its written again and again, in many single random files with single exported functions
if a enter a mature code base as a new team member, I will have to go through all the code searching for all kinds of logic to probably find something that fits for my new requirement, instead of knowing of 3-5 centralized services that I can easily locate by the domain object name
since a team never communicates a central architecture, as presented here, patterns of the system are build randomly on the feature base, same logic is distributed all over the place, I am sorry but how is this a good approach?
I never used directly the CLEAN architecture, but I always talk about a "domain oriented" approach it ends up being something more simpler like the architecture presented here. The core Idea is the same, the whole app is split into domains, business and tech and this is basic separation of concerns...
Not forgetting how much easier it get when you start to use feature flags.
But I don't want to criticise the way others work, as long as it delivers a good, maintainable product.
Just saw this.
I am not criticizing how the author works. That's entirely up to the author (or the team).
I am criticizing what the author recommends to others. Anyone who gets up on a soapbox (myself included) is fair game for criticism having essentially put it out there and asked for it.
Thank you very much it's just what I needed.
So your point of view was so much clean to understand, thanks to collaborate am i FE dev in a transition do Mid > Senior and your answer helped me a lot to get another ideas.
Yeah, agree on this one. I believe it is sometimes referred to as "vertical slice architecture".
Also I tend to violate DRY quite often, meaning that some code is duplicated across features. For example to avoid a feature being dependent on shared folder(s) or packages when it is only using one or a few shared functions
Can I explain and show better architecture in react.js?
It would be actually interesting to see this clean architecture shown in a monorepo where the clean parts reside in a library and are re-used by two different frameworks, i.e.
create-react-appandAngular.This is something I'm always keen on. I hate it when libraries for what could be framework-agnostic tools are tightly coupled to the framework.
"If you want to fetch the price of milk install this library and call
useMilkPrice()"What if I want to fetch the price of milk outside of a react context.
This has also been a big annoyance when moving between frameworks. A library that could easily be applied to a vue application has to be abandoned because it's tightly coupled to react.
I always prefer a core library and then a framework-specific wrapper or adapter library.
Rant over.
Very interesting point! It's already in my plans. hehe
Thank you for the contribution.
I agree and waiting.
Lately CUPID has been making the rounds (TwTR; largely pushing back against the dogma associated with Clean X and SOLID).
Yikes. Good architecture and having design principles in place makes coding faster, eases maintenance, and makes your code more robust. Hell, application structure is about 50% of my job.
And by "new age of developers" I assume you're aware the author of the cupid article was born in the 60s 🤔
A little harsh, tho true
:o)I've not come across cupid before but I love it!
One thing that always irks me about solid is it's so steeped in OOP, you really have to twist and squint to apply it to anything else. (It's ironic that principles around coupling are tightly coupled.)
Cupid is actually much easier to apply to FP because it's more about attitudes and approaches than language-specific constructs.
Thanks for sharing!
FYI:
I haven't finished watching this yet (~10 minutes in) but this is a classic age-old debate that has been beaten to death: performance vs readability.
Personally, I think until you actually hit genuine performance issues, readability is way way more important.
Also, this just backs up my view that 99.999% of all Clean Code and SOLID examples are demonstrated in OOP languages and just completely ignore their potential application to FP paradigms.
Don't worry most cases our functions will evolve to classes through refactoring, and that's where SOLID comes in.
Refactoring function into classes? I don't think has ever happened to me ever...
You probably haven't noticed yet, when next you're coding and you come across two or more different functions talking to a variable outside its scope, that a function to class refactoring screaming
It’s really not? And if you’re applying FP then it’s really really not!
@merhmood
FP: different is not the same as difficult.
That said JavaScript is function-oriented.
this is not clean architecture because as Uncle Tom said, it's the framework that is hidding the business for which the app is made. suppose if you have to add the functionality "view customers" how would you work on that?
i haven't mentioned test cases. so you see the problem here? I'm constant jumping from one folder to another. when it comes to bug fixing it would be a mess to locate n fix it.
now consider an alternate approach.
i have a folder src\customers
i add sub folder view and have the page, components, reset api, interface, route models and test cases all in one folder. which once do you think is easier
To be honest, this approach is generic and framework or language agnostic (even if you read the previous article on applying with Flutter, you would see that). Good architecture and implemented design principles make coding faster, easier to maintain, and make your code more robust, as the colleague said in the other comment.
This approach is a suggestion, not a rule. Of course, most developers split up their code into folder structures that make sense for them and their team, but having a guide can make it easier to make fewer mistakes.
And the comment about "spending a lot of time writing articles", is good for exercising knowledge and sharing with people who are interested. I also write to help me write my master's thesis and practice my English.
It's not all just about code, it's also about planning.
Now you can update to React 18 and stop using classes. Function Components! :)
Thanks for the contribution!
Hope to do that next haha It's an ongoing project.
Great article! Vlw, mano
To be honest, I don't know why the devs want to use Clean Architecture in a front-end project, the clean architecture is clear, front-end is a detail, not live in the domain, use clean architecture in front-end is redundant, Clean Architecture is amazing but it's a software architecture that said the Front End its a Detail not live in the domain, create a front-end with Clean Architecture is not Clean Architecture, in my opinion.
Clean architecture in a front-end environment is possible, as long as you stick with the principles of
presenter,view, and the separation of business logic. If you do it correctly enough, you should have zero business logic written in JSX, and it should be easily readable, testable, and maintainable through "computeds" (these can be state-driven, either locally or globally; however, they should be able to be completely extracted out and testable).There's no right or wrong way; however, if it's a hassle for an engineer, it's probably the wrong approach. Clean architecture with things like Redux or React Context is possible, but difficult. There's tooling out there for different approaches, it's up to the engineer to pick the right one for themselves.
Sorry but I do not share the same ideas, Uncle Bob its clear here, the web is a detail, its a delivery mechanism, if your web contains business logic, you are not doing Clean Arch, you can still follow SOLID principles, but not is Clean Arch, React it's a pure front-end tool, I don't see any case where you need to write your uses cases in React/front-end, because the front-end in a correct Clean Arch it is a lower layer, if you are writing your uses cases in front-end, in my opinion, its a bad design, unless, if your web application does not contain a back-en, but that not is a real case.
You can separate entities and their use cases from the engineering-scoped frontend entirely — the computeds I referenced (thought I typed it out, my apologies) would call these entities and their use-cases.
Exactly. In cases of working like this with React, if you need to develop an app in React Native, writing your use cases and separate entities saves you a lot of time because you can reuse many parts. This text approach is not perfect, it needs a separate presenter and view layer for better decoupling, but yes, you can use clean architecture in frontend web applications. Uncle Bob talks about framework and language agnostic architectures, and front end situations apply. In the case of the frontend, the web detail can be considered the framework (React, Angular, Vue), and to change the detail, just change the layer that contains information regarding the framework.
If you are following clean architecture principles in a web system with back end, you front end only need the MVC pattern. And in the controllers you can set references to your use cases, but again in real world the uses cases lives in the back end not in the front end, in my opinion use clean architecture in tools like React not is necessary in most of the case.
I came to the 4 years old project with clean architecture and it sucks.
The codebase grew to enormous size.
The extra abstractions produce lots of refactoring.
FE developers are focusing on coding in compliance with the one architecture but not on the delivering features.
It’s harder, longer and more expensive to hire a FE developer who wants to work with clean architecture .
So now the goal is to get rid of it.
Everyone seem to be forgetting that frameworks, web are listed as details. No matter the concept followed in the src directory, it will always scream react project which is bad, and that's is why Robert C Martin move them to the outermost part of the clean architecture diagram. That's why MVC and MVVM are commonly used, while core business logic are moved to the backend
The web isn't a detail and it hasn't been for a long time. It's actually an engineering constraint governed by the laws of physics.
Martin's Architecture, the Lost Years dates back to 2011 where Rails servers were mostly just delivering content to browsers which was augmented with jquery-pjax and later turbo-links.
The notion:
is still valid today and modernized in UI as an Afterthought.
But we are now in the dawn of Gen 3 where “the application” is the “the front end” + “BFF” with “the web” and all it's constraints in between them. Application architecture will be guided by “what can be done on the server will be done on the server, what has to be done on the client will be done on the client”.
So the web isn't an implementation detail, it's an unyielding part of architectural reality.
However it still is true that in terms of architecture React belongs in the HOW (Horrible Outside World) and that component-orientation has often conflated UI with application concerns.
It took the React community until 2022 to realize that fetching inside a React component isn't a great idea.
Hi guys!
Fantastic deep dive into DDD and clean architecture here! I've been building production apps using these concepts and I can attest it pays off.
I've put together a simple React application that embodies the principles and strategies discussed here, showcasing various state management approaches (React state vs Redux) among other patterns, to illuminate the real-world flexibility and scalability these architectures afford. It's a really simple app but you can use it as a guideline for your projects!
github.com/nicmesan2/todo-list-cle...
Of course, any feedback is more than welcome :)
Cheers!
I feel that this implementation is quite domain-oriented and contains quite a few practices on the backend. Not bad, it can be seen as a starting point, but let's remember that it is a frontend implementation, in my opinion a less centralized vision would work a little better, of course we would have to deal with the DRY, but it separates the logic into small modules and focuses it.
Again, there will never be a correct answer to the question, what is the definitive way to implement the architecture of my project?
just opinions. This depends on the needs of each project.
sir would u mind if u create reactjs and not ts? thank u
Thank you bro, it's a great article! Unfortunately, someone has plagiarized your text: blog.bitsrc.io/how-to-use-clean-ar...