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Consider a restful service in Spring MVC. I am wondering how to package my response classes, i.e. how to name the containing package.

First I thought of them as being domain objects. But they are actually a bit different, because they wrap my true domain objects like this:

{
    header: {
        // ...
    },
    domainObjectSpecificKey: {
        // domain object properties
    }
}

The response class is mapped to the top-level JSON object. So then I thought they may be DTOs actually -- but as far as I understand DTOs are used between application layers, and not for "output" objects to be used between separate applications.

So my questions is: does this kind of object have a special name? If yes, what's that? If not, can we definitely state that it is NOT a DTO or a domain object, i.e. should I name the package differently or can I use the one of that seems better to my liking?

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  • What is the consumer if not another part of the application? If you consider it like that, it's easy to think of these kinds of objects as DTO's
    – Andy Hunt
    May 26, 2015 at 9:24
  • It is some other application. A totally different project. In fact, there can be a couple of other apps using this restful service, they are not "one big application".
    – dsplynm
    May 26, 2015 at 9:26
  • Even then, the name "data transfer object" describes its purpose: transferring data (out of your system)
    – Andy Hunt
    May 26, 2015 at 9:35
  • @AndyBursh, since no-one else seems to be posting other oppinions, if you post your comment as an answer, I'll accept it. Thank you for your thoughts!
    – dsplynm
    May 26, 2015 at 11:19
  • Why don't you simply name your package "response classes?" The correct name is the one that is most descriptive to you, and you're calling them response classes.
    – Robert Harvey
    May 26, 2015 at 15:25

1 Answer 1

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I would consider a class representing a JSON response to be a Data Contract. Keeping it separate from your DTOs and Domain Objects also keeps the clients consuming your service decoupled from the rest of your system.

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