Jimmy Bogard, creator of MediatR, talks about how the mediator pattern emerged from his work with customer applications, breaking down blocks of code into manageable chunks. He discusses the challenges and reflections of software evolution, open source projects, and the boundaries of appropriate use.
The MediatR library emerged as a solution to maintain complex web applications by breaking down code into manageable chunks and promoting loose coupling.
The mediator pattern simplifies code in web applications by separating concerns, improving maintainability, flexibility, and testability.
Deep dives
Mediator pattern explained
The mediator pattern is a solution to deal with complex business logic in web applications. It involves a middleman, called the mediator, that handles the communication between the UI and the services. Instead of the UI directly depending on the services, it sends requests to the mediator, which dispatches them to the appropriate handling logic and returns the response. This pattern promotes loose coupling and simplifies testing by separating the UI from the business logic.
Benefits of using the mediator pattern
The mediator pattern helps to simplify code by separating concerns in web applications. It allows for a clean separation of the UI and business logic, improving maintainability and flexibility. By using the mediator pattern, you can easily introduce new features, support asynchronous operations, and handle complex workflows. It also enhances testability by providing a clear and isolated way to test individual request-response interactions.
Real-world use cases
The mediator pattern is valuable in scenarios where you need to simplify complex web application architectures. It can be used to handle communication between UI components and services, manage business logic in a more decoupled manner, and support asynchronous operations or streaming data. Some specific real-world use cases include handling notifications, orchestrating distributed systems, and integrating with different types of APIs or frameworks.
Advantages of using a mediator library
Using a mediator library, like the Mediator library, can provide several advantages. It enables easier implementation of the mediator pattern, automates dependency injection, and simplifies integration with the existing codebase. Additionally, a mediator library may provide additional features like support for streaming data, handling notifications, or integrating with specific frameworks or platforms.
How about some in-process messaging with no dependencies? Carl and Richard chat with Jimmy Bogard about his work with MediatR, a simple mediator pattern implementation in .NET. Jimmy talks about how MediatR emerged from his work with customer applications having controllers and/or managers that slowly got bigger and more complicated... and how they became difficult to maintain. Using the mediator pattern to break down those blocks of code into more manageable chunks needed a bit of tooling that was cut and pasted from project-to-project until MediatR was born!
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