The light. Finally seeing implementation in full with the lifecycle of Domain Entities. In DDD and software architecture, a domain entity will go through various stages of its life from being created, persisted, deleted or archived. It's not really anything new. What's new to me are how Data Mappers, Domain Entitity factory methods and Repositories enable me to reconstitute objects from their relational or non-relational persistence technology, map them back domain objects and vice versa...