welcome

This book is a distillation of everything I’ve learned about what effective development looks like in Java. It’s what’s left over after years of experimenting, getting things wrong (often catastrophically), and slowly having anything resembling “devotion to a single paradigm” beat out of me by the great humbling filter that is reality.

Data Orientation is not some new paradigm here to beat up all other paradigms and take their lunch. If you like object orientation, functional programming, or any other paradigm, a little touch of data-orientation will make you better at those styles of programming! Data Orientation is about the data, not the specific tools. There are, of course, some patterns and approaches that naturally emerge when you focus on the data, but all of those can be applied readily to whatever paradigm is your preferred one.

This is because data-orientation is born from a very simple idea, and one that people have been rediscovering over and over again since the dawn of computing: “representation is essence of programming”. Programs that are organized around the data they manage tend to be simpler, smaller, and significantly easier understand. When we do a really good job of capturing the data in our domain, the rest of the system tends to fall into place in a way which can feel like it’s writing itself.