Domain Driven Design - Why we need to keep it simple

I'm really happy to see how much discussion there is of DDD these days and it really helps that technologies like NHibernate make it work. I'm also hopeful that ADO.NET Entity Framework will support this style of development whilst also addressing lingering issues, including how your domain model can live happily in a system that has lots of reports or a legacy database.

However the content of some of the discussions is starting to surprise me as instead of discussing real domain modeling issues many seem to want to focus on technology.

The first thing I should say is that discussing DDD without discussing persistence, usually ORM, is silly. Persistence is pervasive in many systems so you need to discuss how you will handle it.

However the same does not go for things like AOP, its perfectly possible to discuss DDD without going near AOP. In fact I would say that it is preferable to try to avoid discussing these complex options every time we discuss DDD for a few reasons:

1. It will turn off to many readers.
2. The more complex technologies are sometimes not required.
3. There is a risk that many people will end up with overly complex solutions if they start out with the view that they have to use something like Spring.NET to make DDD a reality.

Having said that its obviously good that we have the option to use things like AOP but I personally prefer to avoid using them until I really feel they are needed.

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