I want to be clear on this. When I say domain anaemia, I mean intentional domain anaemia, not accidental. In a world where most of our business logic is hidden away behind a bunch of services, is a full domain model really necessary?

This is the question I've had to ask myself recently since working on a project where the "domain" model is in reality a persistence model; none of the domain objects contain any methods and this is a very intentional decision.

Initially, I shuddered when I saw a library full of what are essentially type-safe data containers but after some thought it struck me that this particular system doesn't do much but basic CRUD operations, so maybe in this case this is a good choice. My problem I guess is that my experience so far has been very much focussed on a rich domain model so it threw me a little.

The remainder of the domain logic is hidden away in a group of helpers, facades and factories which live in a separate assembly.

I'm keen to hear what people's thoughts are on this. Obviously, the considerations for reuse of these classes are much simpler but is really that great a benefit?