Composition vs Inheritance: OOP Guide with Examples

Both composition and inheritance are object-oriented programming concepts. They are not tied up with any specific programming language such as Java. Before we compare composition over inheritance programmatically, let’s have a quick definition of them.

Composition is the design technique in object-oriented programming to implement has-a relationship between objects. Composition in java is achieved by using instance variables of other objects. For example, a person who has a Job is implemented like below in java object-oriented programming.

package com.journaldev.composition;

public class Job {
// variables, methods etc.
}

package com.journaldev.composition;

public class Person {

    //composition has-a relationship
    private Job job;

    //variables, methods, constructors etc. object-oriented

Inheritance is the design technique in object-oriented programming to implement is-a relationship between objects. Inheritance in Java is implemented using the extends keyword. For example, Cat is an Animal relationship in java programming will be implemented like below.

package com.journaldev.inheritance;
 
public class Animal {
// variables, methods etc.
}

package com.journaldev.inheritance;
 
public class Cat extends Animal{
}

Both composition and inheritance promote code reuse through different approaches. So which one to choose? How to compare composition vs inheritance. You must have heard that in programming you should favor composition over inheritance. Let’s see some of the reasons that will help you in choosing composition vs inheritance.

1. Inheritance is tightly coupled whereas composition is loosely coupled. Let’s assume we have below classes with inheritance.

   package com.journaldev.java.examples;
   
   public class ClassA {
   
    public void foo(){ 
    }
   }
   
   class ClassB extends ClassA{
    public void bar(){
     
    }
   }
   

   For simplicity, we have both the superclass and subclass in a single package. But mostly they will be in the separate codebase. There could be many classes extending the superclass ClassA. A very common example of this situation is extending the Exception class. Now let’s say ClassA implementation is changed like below, a new method bar() is added.

   package com.journaldev.java.examples;
   
   public class ClassA {
   
    public void foo(){ 
    }
    
    public int bar(){
     return 0;
    }
   }
   

   As soon as you start using new ClassA implementation, you will get compile time error in ClassB as The return type is incompatible with ClassA.bar(). The solution would be to change either the superclass or the subclass bar() method to make them compatible. If you would have used Composition over inheritance, you will never face this problem. A simple example of ClassB implementation using Composition can be as below.

   class ClassB{
    ClassA classA = new ClassA();
    
    public void bar(){
     classA.foo();
     classA.bar();
    }
   }
   

2. There is no access control in inheritance whereas access can be restricted in composition. We expose all the superclass methods to the other classes having access to subclass. So if a new method is introduced or there are security holes in the superclass, subclass becomes vulnerable. Since in composition we choose which methods to use, it’s more secure than inheritance. For example, we can provide ClassA foo() method exposure to other classes using below code in ClassB.

   class ClassB {
    
    ClassA classA = new ClassA();
    
    public void foo(){
     classA.foo();
    }
    
    public void bar(){ 
    }
    
   }
   

   This is one of the major advantage of composition over inheritance.

3. Composition provides flexibility in invocation of methods that is useful with multiple subclass scenario. For example, let’s say we have below inheritance scenario.

   abstract class Abs {
    abstract void foo();
   }
   
   public class ClassA extends Abs{
   
    public void foo(){ 
    }
    
   }
   
   class ClassB extends Abs{
     
    public void foo(){
    }
    
   }
   
   class Test {
    
    ClassA a = new ClassA();
    ClassB b = new ClassB();
   
    public void test(){
     a.foo();
     b.foo();
    }
   }
   

   So what if there are more subclasses, will composition make our code ugly by having one instance for each subclass? No, we can rewrite the Test class like below.

   class Test {
    Abs obj = null;
    
    Test1(Abs o){
     this.obj = o;
    }
    
    public void foo(){
     this.obj.foo();
    }
   
   }
   

   This will give you the flexibility to use any subclass based on the object used in the constructor.

4. One more benefit of composition over inheritance is testing scope. Unit testing is easy in composition because we know what all methods we are using from another class. We can mock it up for testing whereas in inheritance we depend heavily on superclass and don’t know what all methods of superclass will be used. So we will have to test all the methods of the superclass. This is extra work and we need to do it unnecessarily because of inheritance.

That’s all for composition vs inheritance. You have got enough reasons to choose composition over inheritance. Use inheritance only when you are sure that superclass will not be changed, otherwise go for composition.