Clean Architecture in Laravel: Service Layers & Domain Separation
Breaking out of fat controllers and bloated Eloquent models: applying Service-Oriented MVC, DTOs, and interface contracts in modern Laravel applications.
1. Fat Controllers: The Technical Debt Flywheel
As projects grow, placing business logic directly inside HTTP controllers leads to unmaintainable code that cannot be re-used by queue workers or CLI commands. A Clean Architecture enforces that controllers only handle HTTP requests and responses, delegating all domain logic to dedicated Service classes.
2. Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) for Strict Typings
Instead of passing raw array payloads between layers, type-safe Data Transfer Objects enforce validation constraints at runtime and provide IDE autocompletion across the entire application stack.
Writing about distributed systems, resilient queues, database indexing, and pragmatic software craftsmanship.