Re: O-O design, aggregation of objects

[mpeever]

If I call User->new(), should that actually create a database entry?

I'm interested to see what feedback you get. But I assure you, DB writes on object creation is a bad idea. It will lead to a ton of spurious of DB writes, and possibly race conditions. In the very least, creating the objects from the DB will be interesting, as de-serializing those objects from the DB will trigger DB writes...

[dsheroh]

...except that you can instantiate an object without calling ->new, so the infinite loops you mention are easily avoided.

I'd still say "no" to save-immediately-on-create because it's likely to result in a number of spurious database records being created. (I don't know about the OP, but I sometimes instantiate temporary objects which have no reason to be stored persistently.)