Valueobjects Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Domain-Driven Design (DDD) Alignment: Enables strict typing and immutability for business-critical data (e.g., Money, Email, UserId), reducing bugs in financial systems, e-commerce, or identity management.
• Build vs. Buy: Avoids reinventing immutable value objects (e.g., DateRange, Percentage) from scratch, accelerating development for teams already using Laravel/PHP.
• Roadmap Prioritization: Justifies investing in DDD patterns by providing a lightweight, battle-tested foundation for complex domains (e.g., subscription tiers, inventory quantities).
• Use Cases:
  • Validating user inputs (e.g., Email objects reject invalid formats at creation).
  • Enforcing business rules (e.g., OrderTotal prevents negative values).
  • Simplifying API contracts (e.g., returning ProductSku instead of raw strings).

When to Consider This Package

• Adopt if:

  • Your team prioritizes type safety and self-documenting code over raw performance.
  • You’re building domain-rich applications (e.g., SaaS, fintech) where data integrity is critical.
  • You need immutability to prevent side effects in stateful operations (e.g., order processing).
  • Your stack already uses Laravel/PHP and you want to avoid JavaScript/TypeScript alternatives.

• Look elsewhere if:

  • Your project is prototype/simple CRUD with no complex business logic.
  • You require high-performance serialization (e.g., for microservices; consider spatie/array-to-object or custom solutions).
  • Your team lacks DDD experience—this package assumes familiarity with value objects.
  • You need active maintenance (fork the original or contribute; current stars/score are red flags).

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For Executives: "This package lets us treat critical data (like prices or user emails) as self-validating objects—catching errors early and reducing support costs. For example, an Email object will reject invalid formats at creation, saving QA time. It’s a lightweight way to adopt Domain-Driven Design without heavy refactoring, ideal for scaling our [product domain]."

For Engineering: *"We’re adding a zero-dependency way to enforce immutability and validation for core data types. Instead of:

$price = 9.99; // Could become -9.99 anywhere

We’d use:

$price = new Money(9.99, 'USD'); // Throws on invalid input

This aligns with our DDD goals and plays well with Laravel’s type-hinting. Tradeoff: Slightly more boilerplate upfront, but long-term safety gains—especially for financial or user-facing logic."*