Matthias Noback: Doctrine ORM and DDD aggregates

Matthias Noback has a post to his site today covering the use of Doctrine with domain-driven design as it relates to the definition and creation of the entities in your system.

As I discovered recently, you don't need an edge case to drop Doctrine ORM altogether. But since there are lots of projects using Doctrine ORM, with developers working on them who would like to apply DDD patterns to it, I realized there is probably an audience for a few practical suggestions on storing aggregates (entities and value objects) with Doctrine ORM.

He starts the article off by making a recommendation when building out your domain and entities: don't build with the ORM in mind. Its easy to think that entities and ORM models are the same thing, but he recommends defining them first and then figuring out how to work them in to the model structure. Eventually storing them and their state will have to be considered but that shouldn't influence the design. He illustrates with simple Line and PurchaseOrder entities and how to modify the base classes so they can be managed by Doctrine. He also covers some of the other concerns of making the transition over from entities to models in Doctrine (constraints, custom DBAL types, etc). He finishes the post covering annotations, the "one transaction only" DDD idea and value objects.