Simplified Folder Structure

Another brain dump.

Updated: Dec 2, 2022, to reflect DataObjects (instead of DTO) and add Responses to enforce structure being returned. Removed Actions in favour of moving shared code to a Library

Discovered Laravel Actions brings the developer experience I like, making coding more fun and easier to reason about.

I thought about taking it a step further and seeing if there is a way to continue this simplicity for the rest of the application structure.

Here is what I came up with

Processes – Business Logic

Libraries – Collection of classes that encapsulates a rich set of functionalities – generally meant to be reused across processes, e.g. $notification->sendMessage($recipient, $message)

Models – as you know them – interacts with the data store

DataObjects – as the name suggests – medium by which data is passed around throughout the applications (generally parameters or responses)

Responses – transforming data into a structure before being returned to the requestor

Services – Collection of classes used to interact with third-party interfaces. Services should be implemented using Contracts to enforce a standard interface. This will be helpful if you need to replace the service with another service.

That’s it nothing else to add or take away

Looks something like this:

app
|--Processes
|--DataObjects
|--Libraries
|--Models
|--Responses
|--Services
    |--Contracts

— OR —

app
|-- Domain
      |--Foo
        |--Processes
        |--DataObjects
        |--Libraries
        |--Models
        |--Responses
        |--Services
            |-- Contracts
      |--Bar
        |--Processes
        |--DataObjects
        |--Libraries
        |--Models
        |--Responses
        |--Services
            |-- Contracts

The goal is to make your code easy to reason about, as there is a common understanding when moving from organisation to organisation.