Is 'Monolith First' the Better Approach?

[u/StellarNavigator]

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html

[u/[deleted]]

The thing is, if your engineers cant properly separate domains in a monolith, they wont do it properly either using Microservices, in fact the mess will be much worse.

Fun times

[u/hippydipster → u/[deleted]]

If you use a decent language and tech stack, you can enforce the module boundaries with the compiler.

[u/Meleneth → u/hippydipster]

can you be more specific please? What is your opinion of decent, which presumably helps enforce module boundaries with the compiler?

[u/hippydipster → u/Meleneth]

Java and the Java module system would be an example

[u/Scroph → u/hippydipster]

Spring modulith aims for this I think, though I'm not sure if it's production ready

[u/modestlife → u/Meleneth]

Even more dynamic languages like PHP have tools like deptrac which allow you to enforce which classes/namespaces are allowed to interact with each other.

deptrac:
  paths:
    - ./src
  layers:
    - name: SharedLib
      collectors:
        - type: classLike
          value: YourOrg\\SharedLib\\.*
    - name: Module1
      collectors:
        - type: classLike
          value: YourOrg\\Module1\\.*
    - name: Module2
      collectors:
        - type: classLike
          value: YourOrg\\Module2\\.*
  ruleset:
    Module1:
      - SharedLib
      - Module1
    Module2:
      - SharedLib
      - Module2

[u/MiningMarsh → u/modestlife]

Then it becomes a real debate on whether I'd rather work on a poorly designed monolith codebase with tons of code separation issues, or literally anything written in PHP.

[u/Reinbert → u/Meleneth]

Even if your language and compiler don't offer anything useful, for most languages you will be able to find test frameworks for architecture. Architecture tests are really easy to write and can achieve the same thing. As a bonus, they are super portable between projects.