Question

In JavaScript what sort of inheritance do you favour? The ECMA standard is to use prototype chaining. So I just set the prototype of the object that’s doing the inheriting (monkey) to invoke a new instance of the object I want to inherit from (animal):

monkey.prototype = new animal();

I am aware there are other ways to achieve inheritance. i.e inheriting only the prototype, parasitic inheritance, deep copy, shallow copy.

Can anyone enlighten me and tell me if there is one in particular I should use? One that has benefits that outweigh the other methods.

Answer 1

Theres a lot better article on it here than I could ever write. http://www.crockford.com/javascript/inheritance.html

In general it depends on what you want to achieve. In general though I think duck typing is what is considered best for javascript.