[stevebmark]

This confirms my suspicion that "domain" has no definition. If "storing data" is a domain than anything can be a domain, and the word is meaningless.

There are logical groupings of nouns and functionality into services / modules / orthogonal parts of the software. Aggregate root is one useful term here, domain is not.

And for me it further reinforces the point of the article: design functional horizontal layers, not ones locked into your business "domains".

[kingdomcome50]

Come on now... You know perfectly well that "storing data" means something different to database software than some shitty LoB app. Let's not be so imprecise as to give off a disingenuous impression. The article makes almost no argument against DDD, and in fact could be a case study supporting the opposite conclusion! The author confuses architecture with design in every important way (similar to your "horizontal layers" comment).

DDD is not about how software is physically organized nor how it is deployed. You can have a traditional N-tier architecture AND follow DDD. The domain model is a logical model used to abstract the functional requirements of a system. It doesn't "lock" you in anymore than whatever else you have in place serving the same purpose. You cannot simply avoid your functional requirements. DDD is a methodology with the specific goal of drawing boundaries (answering "what" goes "where") in such a way to minimize the cost of change. If your resulting design is not doing so, you have simply failed to model your domain in a useful way.

In the author's case, maybe they really did need a generic "data integration" or "workflow engine" application. That's not an unreasonable assumption. And it follows that coupling those kinds of applications to the data/workflows contained therein would lead to all sorts of problems.

But surely he is not arguing that every application should be designed as a platform? It's considerably more difficult to design and maintain a "workflow engine" than "a single workflow", or a "data ingestion" application than to "just ingest the data". Most of the important bits in the above are already abstracted away from users.