Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Chapter 1. Layering

Layering is one of the most common techniques that software designers use to break apart a complicated software system. You see it in machine architectures, where layers descend from a programming language with operating system calls into device drivers and CPU instruction sets, and into logic gates inside chips. Networking has FTP layered on top of TCP, which is on top of IP, which is on top of ethernet.

When thinking of a system in terms of layers, you imagine the principal subsystems in the software arranged in some form of layer cake, where each layer rests on a lower layer. In this scheme the higher layer uses various services defined by the lower layer, but the lower layer is unaware of the higher layer. Furthermore, ...