Mobile Clean Architecture — Part one — Clean Architecture Fundamentals

Introduction

Having worked at several companies that value SOLID principles, I’ve gotten further into the writings of Robert C Martin. Starting with reading online articles and blogs around the SOLID principles, I read Martin’s Clean Code book which then led me to Clean Architecture.

Alongside reading the book I was starting to learn mobile application development. This is the first in a series of three articles on Clean Architecture, its implementation in a simple Xamarin.Forms 5 mobile web application and how beginning an application with a Clean Architecture approach helps makes future changes easy.

Architectural Paradigms

Martin posits that software architecture is the same regardless of type, size or complexity of a system, believing that code is made up of the same constructs now as it was 50 years ago… ‘if’ statements for example. The syntax might have changed but the paradigms are the same.

There are three different engineering paradigms, or ways of structuring code, and it is unlikely we will ever need a fourth:

1. Structured Programming — introduced in 1968, imposes discipline on direct transfer of control (replaces goto statements with if/then/else)
2. Object-Oriented Programming — introduced in 1966, imposes discipline on indirect transfer of control (constructors, methods, local variables)