A Discussion on Domain Driven Design: Value Objects

In my previous post we talked about Entities. Entities have a lot of overhead associated with them. They have a full lifecycle from cradle to grave. They also have identity which forces the domain model to be very expressive in tracking and coordinating their transient states. It would be great if we could compositionally break up the Entity into smaller objects that form descriptive attributes of the Entity itself but don’t have identity. Luckily for us these sometimes smaller objects are referred to as Value Objects in Domain Driven Design.