Javascript OOP
Protected members in JavaScript
If you’ve done much OOP in JavaScript, you can probably already simulate private member variables, by putting variables in a constructor’s closure (if not, go read this summary by Douglas Crockford). But you may not know that you can also emulate the protected status of C++ and Java — variables shared between parent and child classes, yet not exposed as public. This is occasionally useful, but is a little obscure to implement in JS if you don’t know how. The basic idea is use the ‘parasitic constructor’ pattern — where a child constructor directly calls the parent constructor — and passing in an object defined in the context of the child constructor. The parent constructor decorates this object, and because JavaScript object arguments are effectively passed by reference, the members of this object are visible within the child constructor. As such, your child and parent constructors have a ‘shared secret’ object that effectively acts as a map of all the protected members.
July 10, 2014
Why I like parasitic inheritance
When you’re starting out with JavaScript, it doesn’t take long for the question of object oriented programming to raise its head. As soon as you want to build anything non-trivial you’re going to want some means of structuring your solution and imposing some kind of abstraction on your code. Most tutorials these days emphasise use of the prototype chain - either through function.prototype or the ECMAScript 4 Object.create() interface. I, however, am still fond of the more basic parasitic inheritance approach - where inheritance is basically a special case of composition - and I wanted to outline my reasons why.
May 29, 2014