So far I’ve got only 2 problems with the inheritance mechanism from the earlier post.
- it doesn’t allow for multiple inheritance. I’m ok with that…coming from java it is just what I’m used to. However, it doesn’t rule out the possiblility of employing a Class Augmentation approach from being used along with it.
- navigating the prototype chain is tricky. Since the code is ‘resetting’ the constructor property on the prototype…I don’t see a way for program code to traverse the chain (aside from using the non-standard ‘__proto__’ property). This is fine for the code that is aware this is the case…it can look for the ’superClass’ property that the inheritance code is adding…but yeah, thats a ‘gotcha’ for when you are wanting to integrate with another library that wants to (for whatever reason) traverse the chain.
I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I dabbled with adding support for calling overridden superclass methods. It was really more as a fun exercise than anything else as I still don’t see a huge problem with just directly calling the superclass method like so: SuperClass.prototype.someMethod.call(this, arg1, arg2);
So the result is the ability to, from any method (i.e. not the constructor) call this.callSuper(); and it will call the superclasses implementation of the method that you are in! You can also call this.callSuperByName(’methodName’); and it will call the superclasses implementation of the method with the given name. It is intelligent enough to begin searching the prototype chain from the depth that the code that called the ‘callSuper’ method is located.
I’ll post the code soon…need to get ready for work (and I want to make sure it works in more than just one browser :)).
