Investigate factory methods as alternative entity creation mechanism

[mp911de]

It would make sense to explore the support of how to create entities by using factory methods. Often times, immutable types come with factory methods (of, create) instead of using the constructor mechanism for entity creation:

class Person {

	private final String firstname, lastname;

	private Person(String firstname, String lastname) {
		this.firstname = firstname;
		this.lastname = lastname;
	}

	public static Person of(String firstname, String lastname) {
		return new Person(firstname, lastname);
	}
}

class Person {

	private final String firstname, lastname;

	private Person(String firstname, String lastname) {
		this.firstname = firstname;
		this.lastname = lastname;
	}

	public static Person of(String firstname) {
		return new Person(firstname, "unknown");
	}

	@Factory
	public static Person of(String firstname, String lastname) {
		return new Person(firstname, lastname);
	}
}

The flip side is that factory methods were not considered at all and we need to determine how to enable the use of factory methods. Typically, factory methods contain validation while constructors don't.