I firmly agree with Domain-Driven Design, but a few weeks ago I looked back at my last several projects and thought that I may not have been adhering to it. Martin Fowler wrote about an anti-pattern called AnemicDomainModel on this page quite a while back. Looking at the last few applications I have written for this client, I basically see a whole lot of bean-like objects, that is objects with a lot of state (getters/setters) but no behavior – a big indicator of the AnemicDomainModel. How could I have fallen into this trap? I struggled for quite a while trying to decide where I screwed up and what precipitated this issue. Have I worked at a high level for too long and forgotten how to take care of the details? Have I been doing too many WebSphere installations and integration setups to do the software development? After thinking about it for a while I finally settled on the opinion that what I’ve been modeling for the last few projects really is anemic, at least from the software design/class modeling perspective, so I can dig my head out of the sand. Read the rest of this entry »