A defense of so-called anemic domain models

Speaker: Luís Marques

Abstract: The central point of object-oriented design is the combination of data and the methods that operate upon it. Thus, many people consider it an anti-pattern when you have domain objects with few behaviors, mostly providing access to their data, and being operated upon by service objects, where much of the domain knowledge will reside instead. We claim that many instances of these so-called anemic domain models are actually sound designs. Rather than being an anti-pattern, they are a necessary consequence of taking the single responsibility principle seriously. Furthermore, we'll argue that D is well-positioned to create and exploit single-responsibility entities.

Luís Marques is a generalist programmer, with a good grasp of computer architecture and distributed systems. He is currently pursuing his PhD, which aims to provide probabilistic timeliness guarantees in wireless networks operating in uncertain environments, such as wireless sensor networks. In his free time you might find him doing embedded systems development, creating his own CPU, or trying to come up with a generic algorithm to neatly solve a problem.