[cjg]

That was the video I watched and I just don't get what is different about polylith.

The video spends too long telling me things I already know - e.g. what are functions / objects / layers / etc.

Tell me something I don't know - such as what makes Polylith unique. The video says this is "Components". Well what's so different about those? They sound like microservices or perhaps high-level objects. Or perhaps interfaces.

Show an example!

[logarhythm]

The idea with that part of the video was to couch the new concept (components) within the framework of existing concepts (functions, objects, layers, etc.) to try to help people connect the new concept at the right place in their knowledge graph. Though your feedback makes me think it didn't work as well as I hoped.

Components do have attributes in common with microservices and with stateless objects (e.g. a public interface and encapsulated implementation).

Where components differ from microservices is that a component's interface is simply a collection of functions, rather than network-facing endpoints. This means that multiple components can be deployed into a single artefact, keeping deployment complexity and cost down.

Where components differ from objects is that a component is a higher-level abstraction, closer in scope to a microservice.

However, we think that Polylith's biggest differentiator is the separation it gives between development and production. Let's say you have a Polylith project with 100 components, that you deploy in production across 10 services. You can work with all 100 components in a single development environment, and test them as though they're a monolith, even though they're not deployed that way in production. It's a lot like building systems with LEGO, and we think its just as fun!

[FpUser]

>"Where components differ from microservices is that a component's interface is simply a collection of functions"

Is this a "collection of functions" or "collection of function declarations"? If you want to communicate concepts this is not the best example. And for either case many languages already have the solutions.

[logarhythm]

Technically, a Polylith interface is a collection of "pass-through" functions, each of which delegate their function call to an "implementation" function within the component.

I agree with you that many languages have syntax to support building interfaces. However, I've yet to come across one that offers all the benefits of Polylith's approach with components.