Monday, February 2, 2015

Prefer Composition to Inheritance

Soroush Khanlou:

But this is inelegant and we wish we could just force our users to subclass something so that we can hide this behavior away. But don’t fret! We have options outside of inheritance. To add behavior in a composition-friendly way, we use the Decorator pattern.

[…]

A particularly elegant note on this solution: the wrapper itself doesn’t conform to SKRequestTemplate, even though its parameter does. This means that if we add a new method to the protocol and try to use it from the safe template, the compiler will groan at us. It must be defined on the safe template before we can use it, and we’ll be reminded to add it there as well. Normally, with inheritance, your “contract” with the outside world includes all of your superclass’s methods; with decoration, you only have to provide what you say you’ll provide. Aaron Patterson documents a case where the rails/core team got bitten by this exact problem.

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