Avoid inheritance for implementation

Revision as of 03:29, 20 July 2009

The core idea here is not to create a subclass merely to access the functionality of the superclass. An example:

class Grapher extends DataList

Now the Graphing class can use all the functionality of the DataList class. But intuitively, the declaration looks wrong, mainly because a Grapher isn't a type of DataList. A graph should have have a DataList, but it isn't strictly a list of data itself.

This will cause problems since Grapher exposes its internal data list to outside classes (bad for encapsulation), we can't extend the class easily if we want a graph that draws two lists of data, rather than a single one, and also, we are creating unnecessary class hierarchy.

Instead, the Grapher should contain a DataList object internally. This avoids the above issues, as well as being more semantically correct (a Graph has a DataList)

See Also

• Favor composition over inheritance
• Don't burn your base class
• BaseBean