Design

The design of the library follows the layered architecture of domain driven design: interfaces, application, domain, and infrastructure.

The library is designed to allow its default functionality to be extended or replaced easily.

Layered architecture

Any interface layer will depend on the application layer.

The library’s application layer depends on the domain model and infrastructure layers. An application object has a repository, from which existing aggregates can be retrieved. It may also have policies, such as a persistence policy which stores domain events in an event store. The application’s repository shares the event store with the persistence policy, and uses the event store to retrieve events when reconstructing the state of an aggregate.

The library’s domain layer contains domain model events and aggregates. Aggregates define a set of domain event classes, and have command methods to trigger new domain events. Nothing in the domain layer depends on anything in the infrastructure layer. These stand-alone library classes are implemented with “double underscore” methods, to keep the normal object namespace free to be used for domain modelling.

The library’s infrastructure layer encapsulates infrastructural services required by event sourced applications, in particular by the event store. This layer is the original core of this library (the other layers were originally included merely as reference examples, to demonstrate how to use the infrastructure).

Domain event store

The central object of the infrastructure layer is the event store. The event store object uses a sequenced item mapper and a record manager. Domain events are serialised to (and deserialised from) sequenced items by the sequenced item mapper. The record manager records (and reads) sequenced items in a particular database system.