This interview kind of slipped my radar. Actually I didn’t have time until now to actually watch it. Now when I had however, I sincerely recommend everybody who’s slightly interested in DDD to watch it. It’s only 30 minutes.

One of the more interesting things he talked about, was have the domain model care only about writes. This is something for my x co-workers at Contiki to have a look at (guys, I believe this could help you out). Why is this interesting and not only nuts!? Well, it opened up a door for me related to my concerns around the usage of DTO’s. Why would I want to transform all my domain objects to DTO’s for the sake of moving it to some client to display data on a screen?

Greg suggest using DTO’s for displaying data to the user (think of it as a report), and pushing all your writes through your domain model (all changes to your domain). By doing this you get domain objects without getters and setters! That shouldn't be a goal in itself, but think about what it really means… Done thinking? Let me add a few more … (dots) Ok, ok… It means (as I interpret it) you create a separation between what your system needs to show to the end user and what your domain should care about. Why clutter the domain with reports?

If you have any thoughts about this, please let me know. Thanks.