In java, you can use one type as template of making another type. The new type can inherit all the same behavior as the original type. This is known as inheritance. Java class inheritance allows you to reuse existing type functionality and let you make modification in behaviors as it fit. Inheritance in the other words is when you design your classes by what they are rather than what they do. This is also term as “Is-a relationship” which sometimes can be misleading. For example, an SUV car or Sedan car can inherit the supper class base Car/ Vehicle on the “Is a relationship” functionality. The same time, it could be implemented based on the “Has- a relationship” functionality because, a car has a tire, break, engine etc. so when it comes to determining which one to implement, this becomes a little bit confusing. This seems to be very bad to me because the sub classes are base on the super or base classes and when something accidentally changes from the base classes, it automatically affects the sub classes.

Composition in the other hand is a design technique use to implement has-a relationship in classes unlike an inheritance which is an “IS A” relationship classes. Composition is basically designing the class base on what they do. According to Wikipedia, composition is a principle that classes achieve polymorphic behavior and code reuse by containing instances of other classes that implement the desired functionality rather than inheriting from the base or parent class.

Again, in composition, we can control the visibility of other objects to the client classes and reuse only what we need.

In general, composition is has-a relationship between objects, it is implemented using instance variables, code can be reused, it hide visibility to client classes and more importantly is it flexible to use.

Now, what do I learn from this study? I have come to learn that implementation of composition over inheritance basically start with the creation of various interfaces representing the behaviors that the code will perform.

I have also learn that inheritance will not only encourage you to go predicting the future which may or may not work but it also encourages you to built the branches of object very early in the project and you are likely to make a very big design mistake whiles doing that because we cannot predict the future even though we feel like we could. To me, inheritance is very bad way of designing classes as sub classes may inherit some functionalities from the supper classes which will never been used but cannot do away with it. With regards, I do not see myself designing a projects using inheritance unless for educational purpose project that will explicitly require me to use of inheritance. I will always go for composition when designing project with multiple functionalities.

Citations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Exploration by ioplay and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.