Composition versus inheritance

In the previous section, we learned how to create modules, how to make them communicate, and how to use them. Let's talk a bit about how to architect modules. There are dozens of ways to build a good application. There are also some great books written only on this subject, but we will focus on two of the most commonly used techniques: composition and inheritance. It's really important to understand the difference between the two. They both have pros and cons. In most of the cases, their usage depends on the current project.

The car class from the previous sections is a perfect example of composition. The functionalities of the car object are built by other small objects. So, the main module actually delegates its jobs to other classes. For example, the wheels or the air conditioning of the car are controlled by externally defined modules:

var wheels = require("./wheels.js")();
var control = require("./control.js")();
var airConditioning = require("./air.js")();
module.export = {
  run: function() {
    wheels.init();
    control.forward();
    airConditioning.start();
  }
}

For the outside world, the car has only one method: run. However, what happens is that we perform three different operations, and they are defined in other modules. Often, the composition is preferred over the inheritance because while using this approach, we can easily add as many modules as we want. It's also interesting that we cannot only include modules but also other compositions.

On the other side is the inheritance. The following code is a typical example of inheritance:

var util = require("util");
var EventEmitter = require('events').EventEmitter;
var Class = function() { }
util.inherits(Class, EventEmitter);

This code implies that our class needs to be an event emitter, so it simply inherits that functionality from another class. Of course, in this case, we can still use composition and create an instance of the EventEmitter class, define methods such as on and dispatch, and delegate the real work. However, here it is much better to use inheritance.

The truth is somewhere in between—the composition and the inheritance should play together. They are really great tools, but each of them has its own place. It's not only black and white, and sometimes it is difficult to find the right direction. There are three ways to add behavior to our objects. They are as follows:

The second one is related to inheritance and the last one is actually a composition. By using composition, we are adding a few more abstraction layers, which is not a bad thing, but it could lead to unnecessary complexity.