Skipping Incoming Ports

While the outgoing ports are necessary to invert the dependency between the application layer and the outgoing adapters (to make the dependencies point inward), we don't need the incoming ports for dependency inversion. We could decide to let the incoming adapters access our application services directly, without incoming ports in between, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 11.3: Without incoming ports, we lose clearly marked entry points to the domain logic

By removing the incoming ports, we have reduced a layer of abstraction between incoming adapters and the application layer. Removing layers of abstraction usually feels rather good.

The incoming ports, however, define the entry points into our application core. Once we remove them, we must know more about the internals of our application to find out which service method we can call to implement a certain use case. By maintaining dedicated incoming ports, we can identify the entry points...