Over a decade has passed since Robert C. Martin posted an article about Clean Architecture on the Clean Coder Blog (in 2012). Later (in 2017) it was followed up by an entire book about the same topic. This tutorial is not aimed to argue pro or contra the concept but is written to present some practical aspects on how to implement the persistence layer followed by the idea of Clean Architecture.

One aspect discussed in this topic is that the business core (which is normally referred to as being “inner”) must not depend on any technical or environmental details (referred to as being “outer”). The motivation behind this rule is to express importance: in other words, less important parts of the code shall depend on more important, but not the other way around. In this regard, business logic is important (as that is the point why the given software exists); how it is deployed and how data is stored is less important. This has several implications. For example, one implication is that none of the business classes shall be annotated by framework-related annotations; in practice, no Spring annotations on classes with business logic, no JPA annotations on entities that these classes are working on, etc.