Glossary
A running glossary for the ZibiWorks series. The audience is experienced architects, developers growing into architecture, and technical leaders, so the definitions stay concise rather than exhaustive. Where a term is explored in depth by an installment, the entry links to it.
Terms are defined where they first do real work in the story, so some point to installments that are still being written. Those references name the installment without linking until it is published.
Architecture patterns
Section titled “Architecture patterns”A controlled point where one implementation can be substituted for another without the callers changing. A good seam expresses a business capability, not the mechanics of the code behind it. Explored in Installment 05: The First Seam.
Bounded context
Section titled “Bounded context”A boundary within which a particular domain model and its business language hold one consistent meaning. The same word can mean different things in different contexts, which is often how the boundary reveals itself. Explored in Installment 04: Boundaries and Meaning.
Strangler Fig
Section titled “Strangler Fig”An incremental modernization approach that grows new functionality around a legacy system and redirects responsibility to it a piece at a time, rather than replacing everything at once. Chosen in Installment 03: Rewrite vs. Evolve.
Anti-corruption layer (ACL)
Section titled “Anti-corruption layer (ACL)”A translation boundary that keeps one system’s model from leaking into another, normalizing an external or legacy vocabulary into the terms the consuming domain actually uses. An ACL is a design boundary, not necessarily a separately deployed service. Taken up in Installment 06: Domain or Utility?
Aggregate
Section titled “Aggregate”A cluster of domain objects treated as a single unit for changes, governed by a
defined consistency boundary. In the ZibiWorks story, the legacy Order
aggregate is where several domains’ responsibilities became entangled.
Implementation techniques
Section titled “Implementation techniques”Dependency injection (DI)
Section titled “Dependency injection (DI)”Supplying a component with the dependencies it needs from the outside rather than having it construct them internally. It is what lets a seam resolve to one implementation or another without the consumer knowing which.
Composition root
Section titled “Composition root”The single place in an application where its dependencies are assembled and configured. Centralizing the wiring there is what lets a substitution decision live in one spot instead of being scattered through the business code.
Migration scaffolding
Section titled “Migration scaffolding”Temporary code or infrastructure introduced to make a transition safe and incremental, expected to be removed once the migration is complete. Temporary does not mean wasteful: scaffolding earns its place by making a cut reversible, then comes down.