Stackoverflow users: A lot of things can be represented in programs by using the basic types, or we can create a new class for it. Example: A social security number can be a number, string or its own object. (Other common examples: Phone numbers, names, zip codes, user id, order id and other id's.) My question is: When should the basic types be used, and when should we write ourselves a new class? I see that when you need to add behavior, you'll want to create a class (example, social security number parsing, validation, formatting, etc). But is this the only criteria? I have come across cases where many of these things are represented as java Integers and/or Strings. We loose the benefit of type-checking, and I have often seen bugs caused by parameters being mixed in calls to function(Intever, Integer, Integer, Integer). On the other hand, some programmers are opposed to over-designing by creating classes for "eveything". Obviously, the answer is "it depends". But, what do you think, and what do you normally do?