What is Composition with casts in Laravel, and what role does it play in a real application?

What is Composition with casts in Laravel, and what role does it play in a real application? In Laravel, composition with casts should be understood as part of a larger application architecture rather than as an isolated API call. Modern attribute APIs allow related casting and transformation behavior to be expressed in one place. A strong understanding includes its purpose, the layer where it belongs, the data or request flow it affects, and the situations where another mechanism may be more appropriate. Practical context: Eloquent attribute transformations let models present or normalize attribute values through reusable model-level logic. The specific focus here is composition with casts: Modern attribute APIs allow related casting and transformation behavior to be expressed in one place. This question is designed to test not only terminology, but also how the concept fits into Laravel's request, application, database, security, or deployment workflow.