bridge pattern vs. decorator pattern - c++

Can anybody elaborate the Bridge design pattern and the Decorator pattern for me. I found it similar in some way. I don't know how to distinguish it?
My understanding is that in Bridge, it separate the implementation from the interface, generally you can only apply one implementation. Decorator is kind of wrapper, you can wrap as many as you can.
For example,
Bridge pattern
class Cellphone {
private:
Impl* m_OS; // a cellphone can have different OS
}
Decorator pattern
class Shirt {
private:
Person * m_p; //put a shirt on the person;
}


The Decorator should match the interface of the object you're decorating. i.e. it has the same methods, and permits interception of the arguments on the way in, and of the result on the way out. You can use this to provide additional behaviour to the decorated object whilst maintaining the same interface/contract. Note that the interface of the Decorator can provide additional functionality to create a more useful object.
The Bridge has no such constraint. The client-facing interface can be different from the underlying component providing the implementation, and thus it bridges between the client's interface, and the actual implementation (which may not be client-friendly, subject to change etc.)


Your decorator pattern implementation isn't quite right - It would make more sense if you did:
class PersonWearingShirt : IPerson
{
private:
IPerson * m_p; //put a shirt on the person;
}
The idea is that, when you decorate a class, you expose the exact same interface. This makes your "decorated" instance look and act like the original. This allows you to wrap an instance many times with multiple decorators, but treat it exactly the same as you treat the original instance.


Decorator:
Add behaviour to object at run time. Inheritance is the key to achieve this functionality, which is both advantage and disadvantage of this pattern.
It enhances the behaviour of interface.
Decorator can be viewed as a degenerate Composite with only one component. However, a Decorator adds additional responsibilities - it isn't intended for object aggregation.
Decorator supports recursive composition
The Decorator class declares a composition relationship to the LCD (Lowest Class Denominator) interface, and this data member is initialized in its constructor.
Decorator is designed to let you add responsibilities to objects without sub-classing
Refer to sourcemaking article for more details.
UML diagram of Decorator from wikipedia:
Bridge pattern:
Bridge is structural pattern
Abstraction and implementation are not bound at compile time
Abstraction and implementation - both can vary without impact in client
Use the Bridge pattern when:
you want run-time binding of the implementation,
you have a proliferation of classes resulting from a coupled interface and numerous implementations,
you want to share an implementation among multiple objects,
you need to map orthogonal class hierarchies.
UML diagram of Bridge from wikipedia:
From UML diagram, you can observe the difference:
In Decorator pattern, Decorator is implementing Component, which will be replaced by ConcreteComponent at run time.
In Bridge pattern, RedefinedAbstraction is not implementing Implementor. Instead, it uses composition so that Implementor can vary dynamically at run time without client knowledge.
Decorator can't decouple abstraction from implementation unlike Bridge pattern.
Few more useful posts:
When to Use the Decorator Pattern?
When do you use the Bridge Pattern? How is it different from Adapter pattern?


Brian is correct. I'll add that conceptually, the client will "know" it's using a bridge to an underlying object, but with a decorator, the client will be unable to know there's a decorator layer between it and the target object.
The purpose of the bridge is to create a layer of abstraction to protect the client. The purpose of the decorator is to add functionality to the object without the client knowing. Most decorators will pass along all function calls directly to a pointer to their parent class, except for functions relating directly to what the decorator is designed to change.

Related

C++ Inheritence vs Using parent class as a field in children classes [duplicate]

Why prefer composition over inheritance? What trade-offs are there for each approach? When should you choose inheritance over composition?

Prefer composition over inheritance as it is more malleable / easy to modify later, but do not use a compose-always approach. With composition, it's easy to change behavior on the fly with Dependency Injection / Setters. Inheritance is more rigid as most languages do not allow you to derive from more than one type. So the goose is more or less cooked once you derive from TypeA.
My acid test for the above is:
Does TypeB want to expose the complete interface (all public methods no less) of TypeA such that TypeB can be used where TypeA is expected? Indicates Inheritance.
e.g. A Cessna biplane will expose the complete interface of an airplane, if not more. So that makes it fit to derive from Airplane.
Does TypeB want only some/part of the behavior exposed by TypeA? Indicates need for Composition.
e.g. A Bird may need only the fly behavior of an Airplane. In this case, it makes sense to extract it out as an interface / class / both and make it a member of both classes.
Update: Just came back to my answer and it seems now that it is incomplete without a specific mention of Barbara Liskov's Liskov Substitution Principle as a test for 'Should I be inheriting from this type?'

Think of containment as a has a relationship. A car "has an" engine, a person "has a" name, etc.
Think of inheritance as an is a relationship. A car "is a" vehicle, a person "is a" mammal, etc.
I take no credit for this approach. I took it straight from the Second Edition of Code Complete by Steve McConnell, Section 6.3.

If you understand the difference, it's easier to explain.
Procedural Code
An example of this is PHP without the use of classes (particularly before PHP5). All logic is encoded in a set of functions. You may include other files containing helper functions and so on and conduct your business logic by passing data around in functions. This can be very hard to manage as the application grows. PHP5 tries to remedy this by offering a more object-oriented design.
Inheritance
This encourages the use of classes. Inheritance is one of the three tenets of OO design (inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation).
class Person {
String Title;
String Name;
Int Age
}
class Employee : Person {
Int Salary;
String Title;
}
This is inheritance at work. The Employee "is a" Person or inherits from Person. All inheritance relationships are "is-a" relationships. Employee also shadows the Title property from Person, meaning Employee.Title will return the Title for the Employee and not the Person.
Composition
Composition is favoured over inheritance. To put it very simply you would have:
class Person {
String Title;
String Name;
Int Age;
public Person(String title, String name, String age) {
this.Title = title;
this.Name = name;
this.Age = age;
}
}
class Employee {
Int Salary;
private Person person;
public Employee(Person p, Int salary) {
this.person = p;
this.Salary = salary;
}
}
Person johnny = new Person ("Mr.", "John", 25);
Employee john = new Employee (johnny, 50000);
Composition is typically "has a" or "uses a" relationship. Here the Employee class has a Person. It does not inherit from Person but instead gets the Person object passed to it, which is why it "has a" Person.
Composition over Inheritance
Now say you want to create a Manager type so you end up with:
class Manager : Person, Employee {
...
}
This example will work fine, however, what if Person and Employee both declared Title? Should Manager.Title return "Manager of Operations" or "Mr."? Under composition this ambiguity is better handled:
Class Manager {
public string Title;
public Manager(Person p, Employee e)
{
this.Title = e.Title;
}
}
The Manager object is composed of an Employee and a Person. The Title behaviour is taken from Employee. This explicit composition removes ambiguity among other things and you'll encounter fewer bugs.

With all the undeniable benefits provided by inheritance, here's some of its disadvantages.
Disadvantages of Inheritance:
You can't change the implementation inherited from super classes at runtime (obviously because inheritance is defined at compile time).
Inheritance exposes a subclass to details of its parent class implementation, that's why it's often said that inheritance breaks encapsulation (in a sense that you really need to focus on interfaces only not implementation, so reusing by sub classing is not always preferred).
The tight coupling provided by inheritance makes the implementation of a subclass very bound up with the implementation of a super class that any change in the parent implementation will force the sub class to change.
Excessive reusing by sub-classing can make the inheritance stack very deep and very confusing too.
On the other hand Object composition is defined at runtime through objects acquiring references to other objects. In such a case these objects will never be able to reach each-other's protected data (no encapsulation break) and will be forced to respect each other's interface. And in this case also, implementation dependencies will be a lot less than in case of inheritance.

Another, very pragmatic reason, to prefer composition over inheritance has to do with your domain model, and mapping it to a relational database. It's really hard to map inheritance to the SQL model (you end up with all sorts of hacky workarounds, like creating columns that aren't always used, using views, etc). Some ORMLs try to deal with this, but it always gets complicated quickly. Composition can be easily modeled through a foreign-key relationship between two tables, but inheritance is much harder.

While in short words I would agree with "Prefer composition over inheritance", very often for me it sounds like "prefer potatoes over coca-cola". There are places for inheritance and places for composition. You need to understand difference, then this question will disappear. What it really means for me is "if you are going to use inheritance - think again, chances are you need composition".
You should prefer potatoes over coca cola when you want to eat, and coca cola over potatoes when you want to drink.
Creating a subclass should mean more than just a convenient way to call superclass methods. You should use inheritance when subclass "is-a" super class both structurally and functionally, when it can be used as superclass and you are going to use that. If it is not the case - it is not inheritance, but something else. Composition is when your objects consists of another, or has some relationship to them.
So for me it looks like if someone does not know if he needs inheritance or composition, the real problem is that he does not know if he want to drink or to eat. Think about your problem domain more, understand it better.

Didn't find a satisfactory answer here, so I wrote a new one.
To understand why "prefer composition over inheritance", we need first get back the assumption omitted in this shortened idiom.
There are two benefits of inheritance: subtyping and subclassing
Subtyping means conforming to a type (interface) signature, i.e. a set of APIs, and one can override part of the signature to achieve subtyping polymorphism.
Subclassing means implicit reuse of method implementations.
With the two benefits comes two different purposes for doing inheritance: subtyping oriented and code reuse oriented.
If code reuse is the sole purpose, subclassing may give one more than what he needs, i.e. some public methods of the parent class don't make much sense for the child class. In this case, instead of favoring composition over inheritance, composition is demanded. This is also where the "is-a" vs. "has-a" notion comes from.
So only when subtyping is purposed, i.e. to use the new class later in a polymorphic manner, do we face the problem of choosing inheritance or composition. This is the assumption that gets omitted in the shortened idiom under discussion.
To subtype is to conform to a type signature, this means composition has always to expose no less amount of APIs of the type. Now the trade offs kick in:
Inheritance provides straightforward code reuse if not overridden, while composition has to re-code every API, even if it's just a simple job of delegation.
Inheritance provides straightforward open recursion via the internal polymorphic site this, i.e. invoking overriding method (or even type) in another member function, either public or private (though discouraged). Open recursion can be simulated via composition, but it requires extra effort and may not always viable(?). This answer to a duplicated question talks something similar.
Inheritance exposes protected members. This breaks encapsulation of the parent class, and if used by subclass, another dependency between the child and its parent is introduced.
Composition has the befit of inversion of control, and its dependency can be injected dynamically, as is shown in decorator pattern and proxy pattern.
Composition has the benefit of combinator-oriented programming, i.e. working in a way like the composite pattern.
Composition immediately follows programming to an interface.
Composition has the benefit of easy multiple inheritance.
With the above trade offs in mind, we hence prefer composition over inheritance. Yet for tightly related classes, i.e. when implicit code reuse really make benefits, or the magic power of open recursion is desired, inheritance shall be the choice.

Inheritance is pretty enticing especially coming from procedural-land and it often looks deceptively elegant. I mean all I need to do is add this one bit of functionality to some other class, right? Well, one of the problems is that inheritance is probably the worst form of coupling you can have
Your base class breaks encapsulation by exposing implementation details to subclasses in the form of protected members. This makes your system rigid and fragile. The more tragic flaw however is the new subclass brings with it all the baggage and opinion of the inheritance chain.
The article, Inheritance is Evil: The Epic Fail of the DataAnnotationsModelBinder, walks through an example of this in C#. It shows the use of inheritance when composition should have been used and how it could be refactored.

When can you use composition?
You can always use composition. In some cases, inheritance is also possible and may lead to a more powerful and/or intuitive API, but composition is always an option.
When can you use inheritance?
It is often said that if "a bar is a foo", then the class Bar can inherit the class Foo. Unfortunately, this test alone is not reliable, use the following instead:
a bar is a foo, AND
bars can do everything that foos can do.
The first test ensures that all getters of Foo make sense in Bar (= shared properties), while the second test makes sure that all setters of Foo make sense in Bar (= shared functionality).
Example: Dog/Animal
A dog is an animal AND dogs can do everything that animals can do (such as breathing, moving, etc.). Therefore, the class Dog can inherit the class Animal.
Counter-example: Circle/Ellipse
A circle is an ellipse BUT circles can't do everything that ellipses can do. For example, circles can't stretch, while ellipses can. Therefore, the class Circle cannot inherit the class Ellipse.
This is called the Circle-Ellipse problem, which isn't really a problem, but more an indication that "a bar is a foo" isn't a reliable test by itself. In particular, this example highlights that derived classes should extend the functionality of base classes, never restrict it. Otherwise, the base class couldn't be used polymorphically. Adding the test "bars can do everything that foos can do" ensures that polymorphic use is possible, and is equivalent to the Liskov Substitution Principle:
Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it
When should you use inheritance?
Even if you can use inheritance doesn't mean you should: using composition is always an option. Inheritance is a powerful tool allowing implicit code reuse and dynamic dispatch, but it does come with a few disadvantages, which is why composition is often preferred. The trade-offs between inheritance and composition aren't obvious, and in my opinion are best explained in lcn's answer.
As a rule of thumb, I tend to choose inheritance over composition when polymorphic use is expected to be very common, in which case the power of dynamic dispatch can lead to a much more readable and elegant API. For example, having a polymorphic class Widget in GUI frameworks, or a polymorphic class Node in XML libraries allows to have an API which is much more readable and intuitive to use than what you would have with a solution purely based on composition.

In Java or C#, an object cannot change its type once it has been instantiated.
So, if your object need to appear as a different object or behave differently depending on an object state or conditions, then use Composition: Refer to State and Strategy Design Patterns.
If the object need to be of the same type, then use Inheritance or implement interfaces.

Personally I learned to always prefer composition over inheritance. There is no programmatic problem you can solve with inheritance which you cannot solve with composition; though you may have to use Interfaces(Java) or Protocols(Obj-C) in some cases. Since C++ doesn't know any such thing, you'll have to use abstract base classes, which means you cannot get entirely rid of inheritance in C++.
Composition is often more logical, it provides better abstraction, better encapsulation, better code reuse (especially in very large projects) and is less likely to break anything at a distance just because you made an isolated change anywhere in your code. It also makes it easier to uphold the "Single Responsibility Principle", which is often summarized as "There should never be more than one reason for a class to change.", and it means that every class exists for a specific purpose and it should only have methods that are directly related to its purpose. Also having a very shallow inheritance tree makes it much easier to keep the overview even when your project starts to get really large. Many people think that inheritance represents our real world pretty well, but that isn't the truth. The real world uses much more composition than inheritance. Pretty much every real world object you can hold in your hand has been composed out of other, smaller real world objects.
There are downsides of composition, though. If you skip inheritance altogether and only focus on composition, you will notice that you often have to write a couple of extra code lines that weren't necessary if you had used inheritance. You are also sometimes forced to repeat yourself and this violates the DRY Principle (DRY = Don't Repeat Yourself). Also composition often requires delegation, and a method is just calling another method of another object with no other code surrounding this call. Such "double method calls" (which may easily extend to triple or quadruple method calls and even farther than that) have much worse performance than inheritance, where you simply inherit a method of your parent. Calling an inherited method may be equally fast as calling a non-inherited one, or it may be slightly slower, but is usually still faster than two consecutive method calls.
You may have noticed that most OO languages don't allow multiple inheritance. While there are a couple of cases where multiple inheritance can really buy you something, but those are rather exceptions than the rule. Whenever you run into a situation where you think "multiple inheritance would be a really cool feature to solve this problem", you are usually at a point where you should re-think inheritance altogether, since even it may require a couple of extra code lines, a solution based on composition will usually turn out to be much more elegant, flexible and future proof.
Inheritance is really a cool feature, but I'm afraid it has been overused the last couple of years. People treated inheritance as the one hammer that can nail it all, regardless if it was actually a nail, a screw, or maybe a something completely different.

My general rule of thumb: Before using inheritance, consider if composition makes more sense.
Reason: Subclassing usually means more complexity and connectedness, i.e. harder to change, maintain, and scale without making mistakes.
A much more complete and concrete answer from Tim Boudreau of Sun:
Common problems to the use of inheritance as I see it are:
Innocent acts can have unexpected results - The classic example of this is calls to overridable methods from the superclass
constructor, before the subclasses instance fields have been
initialized. In a perfect world, nobody would ever do that. This is
not a perfect world.
It offers perverse temptations for subclassers to make assumptions about order of method calls and such - such assumptions tend not to
be stable if the superclass may evolve over time. See also my toaster
and coffee pot analogy.
Classes get heavier - you don't necessarily know what work your superclass is doing in its constructor, or how much memory it's going
to use. So constructing some innocent would-be lightweight object can
be far more expensive than you think, and this may change over time if
the superclass evolves
It encourages an explosion of subclasses. Classloading costs time, more classes costs memory. This may be a non-issue until you're
dealing with an app on the scale of NetBeans, but there, we had real
issues with, for example, menus being slow because the first display
of a menu triggered massive class loading. We fixed this by moving to
more declarative syntax and other techniques, but that cost time to
fix as well.
It makes it harder to change things later - if you've made a class public, swapping the superclass is going to break subclasses -
it's a choice which, once you've made the code public, you're married
to. So if you're not altering the real functionality to your
superclass, you get much more freedom to change things later if you
use, rather than extend the thing you need. Take, for example,
subclassing JPanel - this is usually wrong; and if the subclass is
public somewhere, you never get a chance to revisit that decision. If
it's accessed as JComponent getThePanel() , you can still do it (hint:
expose models for the components within as your API).
Object hierarchies don't scale (or making them scale later is much harder than planning ahead) - this is the classic "too many layers"
problem. I'll go into this below, and how the AskTheOracle pattern can
solve it (though it may offend OOP purists).
...
My take on what to do, if you do allow for inheritance, which you may
take with a grain of salt is:
Expose no fields, ever, except constants
Methods shall be either abstract or final
Call no methods from the superclass constructor
...
all of this applies less to small projects than large ones, and less
to private classes than public ones

Inheritance is very powerful, but you can't force it (see: the circle-ellipse problem). If you really can't be completely sure of a true "is-a" subtype relationship, then it's best to go with composition.

Inheritance creates a strong relationship between a subclass and super class; subclass must be aware of super class'es implementation details. Creating the super class is much harder, when you have to think about how it can be extended. You have to document class invariants carefully, and state what other methods overridable methods use internally.
Inheritance is sometimes useful, if the hierarchy really represents a is-a-relationship. It relates to Open-Closed Principle, which states that classes should be closed for modification but open to extension. That way you can have polymorphism; to have a generic method that deals with super type and its methods, but via dynamic dispatch the method of subclass is invoked. This is flexible, and helps to create indirection, which is essential in software (to know less about implementation details).
Inheritance is easily overused, though, and creates additional complexity, with hard dependencies between classes. Also understanding what happens during execution of a program gets pretty hard due to layers and dynamic selection of method calls.
I would suggest using composing as the default. It is more modular, and gives the benefit of late binding (you can change the component dynamically). Also it's easier to test the things separately. And if you need to use a method from a class, you are not forced to be of certain form (Liskov Substitution Principle).

Suppose an aircraft has only two parts: an engine and wings.
Then there are two ways to design an aircraft class.
Class Aircraft extends Engine{
var wings;
}
Now your aircraft can start with having fixed wings
and change them to rotary wings on the fly. It's essentially
an engine with wings. But what if I wanted to change
the engine on the fly as well?
Either the base class Engine exposes a mutator to change its
properties, or I redesign Aircraft as:
Class Aircraft {
var wings;
var engine;
}
Now, I can replace my engine on the fly as well.

If you want the canonical, textbook answer people have been giving since the rise of OOP (which you see many people giving in these answers), then apply the following rule: "if you have an is-a relationship, use inheritance. If you have a has-a relationship, use composition".
This is the traditional advice, and if that satisfies you, you can stop reading here and go on your merry way. For everyone else...
is-a/has-a comparisons have problems
For example:
A square is-a rectangle, but if your rectangle class has setWidth()/setHeight() methods, then there's no reasonable way to make a Square inherit from Rectangle without breaking Liskov's substitution principle.
An is-a relationship can often be rephrased to sound like a has-a relationship. For example, an employee is-a person, but a person also has-an employment status of "employed".
is-a relationships can lead to nasty multiple inheritance hierarchies if you're not careful. After all, there's no rule in English that states that an object is exactly one thing.
People are quick to pass this "rule" around, but has anyone ever tried to back it up, or explain why it's a good heuristic to follow? Sure, it fits nicely into the idea that OOP is supposed to model the real world, but that's not in-and-of-itself a reason to adopt a principle.
See this StackOverflow question for more reading on this subject.
To know when to use inheritance vs composition, we first need to understand the pros and cons of each.
The problems with implementation inheritance
Other answers have done a wonderful job at explaining the issues with inheritance, so I'll try to not delve into too many details here. But, here's a brief list:
It can be difficult to follow a logic that weaves between base and sub-class methods.
Carelessly implementing one method in your class by calling another overridable method will cause you to leak implementation details and break encapsulation, as the end-user could override your method and detect when you internally call it. (See "Effective Java" item 18).
The fragile base problem, which simply states that your end-user's code will break if they happen to depend on the leakage of implementation details when you attempt to change them. To make matters worse, most OOP languages allow inheritance by default - API designers who aren't proactively preventing people from inheriting from their public classes need to be extra cautious whenever they refactor their base classes. Unfortunately, the fragile base problem is often misunderstood, causing many to not understand what it takes to maintain a class that anyone can inherit from.
The deadly diamond of death
The problems with composition
It can sometimes be a little verbose.
That's it. I'm serious. This is still a real issue and can sometimes create conflict with the DRY principle, but it's generally not that bad, at least compared to the myriad of pitfalls associated with inheritance.
When should inheritance be used?
Next time you're drawing out your fancy UML diagrams for a project (if you do that), and you're thinking about adding in some inheritance, please adhere to the following advice: don't.
At least, not yet.
Inheritance is sold as a tool to achieve polymorphism, but bundled with it is this powerful code-reuse system, that frankly, most code doesn't need. The problem is, as soon as you publicly expose your inheritance hierarchy, you're locked into this particular style of code-reuse, even if it's overkill to solve your particular problem.
To avoid this, my two cents would be to never expose your base classes publicly.
If you need polymorphism, use an interface.
If you need to allow people to customize the behavior of your class, provide explicit hook-in points via the strategy pattern, it's a more readable way to accomplish this, plus, it's easier to keep this sort of API stable as you're in full control over what behaviors they can and can not change.
If you're trying to follow the open-closed principle by using inheritance to avoid adding a much-needed update to a class, just don't. Update the class. Your codebase will be much cleaner if you actually take ownership of the code you're hired to maintain instead of trying to tack stuff onto the side of it. If you're scared about introducing bugs, then get the existing code under test.
If you need to reuse code, start out by trying to use composition or helper functions.
Finally, if you've decided that there's no other good option, and you must use inheritance to achieve the code-reuse that you need, then you can use it, but, follow these four P.A.I.L. rules of restricted inheritance to keep it sane.
Use inheritance as a private implementation detail. Don't expose your base class publicly, use interfaces for that. This lets you freely add or remove inheritance as you see fit without making a breaking change.
Keep your base class abstract. It makes it easier to divide out the logic that needs to be shared from the logic that doesn't.
Isolate your base and child classes. Don't let your subclass override base class methods (use the strategy pattern for that), and avoid having them expect properties/methods to exist on each other, use other forms of code-sharing to achieve that. Use appropriate language features to force all methods on the base class to be non-overridable ("final" in Java, or non-virtual in C#).
Inheritance is a last resort.
The Isolate rule in particular may sound a little rough to follow, but if you discipline yourself, you'll get some pretty nice benefits. In particular, it gives you the freedom to avoid all of the main nasty pitfalls associated with the inheritance that were mentioned above.
It's much easier to follow the code because it doesn't weave in and out of base/sub classes.
You can not accidentally leak when your methods are internally calling other overridable methods if you never make any of your methods overridable. In other words, you won't accidentally break encapsulation.
The fragile base class problem stems from the ability to depend on accidentally leaked implementation details. Since the base class is now isolated, it will be no more fragile than a class depending on another via composition.
The deadly diamond of death isn't an issue anymore, since there's simply no need to have multiple layers of inheritance. If you have the abstract base classes B and C, which both share a lot of functionality, just move that functionality out of B and C and into a new abstract base class, class D. Anyone who inherited from B should update to inherit from both B and D, and anyone who inherited from C should inherit from C and D. Since your base classes are all private implementation details, it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out who's inheriting from what, to make these changes.
Conclusion
My primary suggestion would be to use your brain on this matter. What's far more important than a list of dos and don'ts about when to use inheritance is an intuitive understanding of inheritance and its associated pros and cons, along with a good understanding of the other tools out there that can be used instead of inheritance (composition isn't the only alternative. For example, the strategy pattern is an amazing tool that's forgotten far too often). Perhaps when you have a good, solid understanding of all of these tools, you'll choose to use inheritance more often than I would recommend, and that's completely fine. At least, you're making an informed decision, and aren't just using inheritance because that's the only way you know how to do it.
Further reading:
An article I wrote on this subject, that dives even deeper and provides examples.
A webpage talking about three different jobs that inheritance does, and how those jobs can be done via other means in the Go language.
A list of reasons why it can be good to declare your class as non-inheritable (e.g. "final" in Java).
The "Effective Java" book by Joshua Bloch, item 18, which discusses composition over inheritance, and some of the dangers of inheritance.

You need to have a look at The Liskov Substitution Principle in Uncle Bob's SOLID principles of class design. :)

To address this question from a different perspective for newer programmers:
Inheritance is often taught early when we learn object-oriented programming, so it's seen as an easy solution to a common problem.
I have three classes that all need some common functionality. So if I
write a base class and have them all inherit from it, then they will
all have that functionality and I'll only need to maintain it in once
place.
It sounds great, but in practice it almost never, ever works, for one of several reasons:
We discover that there are some other functions that we want our classes to have. If the way that we add functionality to classes is through inheritance, we have to decide - do we add it to the existing base class, even though not every class that inherits from it needs that functionality? Do we create another base class? But what about classes that already inherit from the other base class?
We discover that for just one of the classes that inherits from our base class we want the base class to behave a little differently. So now we go back and tinker with our base class, maybe adding some virtual methods, or even worse, some code that says, "If I'm inherited type A, do this, but if I'm inherited type B, do that." That's bad for lots of reasons. One is that every time we change the base class, we're effectively changing every inherited class. So we're really changing class A, B, C, and D because we need a slightly different behavior in class A. As careful as we think we are, we might break one of those classes for reasons that have nothing to do with those classes.
We might know why we decided to make all of these classes inherit from each other, but it might not (probably won't) make sense to someone else who has to maintain our code. We might force them into a difficult choice - do I do something really ugly and messy to make the change I need (see the previous bullet point) or do I just rewrite a bunch of this.
In the end, we tie our code in some difficult knots and get no benefit whatsoever from it except that we get to say, "Cool, I learned about inheritance and now I used it." That's not meant to be condescending because we've all done it. But we all did it because no one told us not to.
As soon as someone explained "favor composition over inheritance" to me, I thought back over every time I tried to share functionality between classes using inheritance and realized that most of the time it didn't really work well.
The antidote is the Single Responsibility Principle. Think of it as a constraint. My class must do one thing. I must be able to give my class a name that somehow describes that one thing it does. (There are exceptions to everything, but absolute rules are sometimes better when we're learning.) It follows that I cannot write a base class called ObjectBaseThatContainsVariousFunctionsNeededByDifferentClasses. Whatever distinct functionality I need must be in its own class, and then other classes that need that functionality can depend on that class, not inherit from it.
At the risk of oversimplifying, that's composition - composing multiple classes to work together. And once we form that habit we find that it's much more flexible, maintainable, and testable than using inheritance.

When you want to "copy"/Expose the base class' API, you use inheritance. When you only want to "copy" functionality, use delegation.
One example of this: You want to create a Stack out of a List. Stack only has pop, push and peek. You shouldn't use inheritance given that you don't want push_back, push_front, removeAt, et al.-kind of functionality in a Stack.

These two ways can live together just fine and actually support each other.
Composition is just playing it modular: you create interface similar to the parent class, create new object and delegate calls to it. If these objects need not to know of each other, it's quite safe and easy to use composition. There are so many possibilites here.
However, if the parent class for some reason needs to access functions provided by the "child class" for inexperienced programmer it may look like it's a great place to use inheritance. The parent class can just call it's own abstract "foo()" which is overwritten by the subclass and then it can give the value to the abstract base.
It looks like a nice idea, but in many cases it's better just give the class an object which implements the foo() (or even set the value provided the foo() manually) than to inherit the new class from some base class which requires the function foo() to be specified.
Why?
Because inheritance is a poor way of moving information.
The composition has a real edge here: the relationship can be reversed: the "parent class" or "abstract worker" can aggregate any specific "child" objects implementing certain interface + any child can be set inside any other type of parent, which accepts it's type. And there can be any number of objects, for example MergeSort or QuickSort could sort any list of objects implementing an abstract Compare -interface. Or to put it another way: any group of objects which implement "foo()" and other group of objects which can make use of objects having "foo()" can play together.
I can think of three real reasons for using inheritance:
You have many classes with same interface and you want to save time writing them
You have to use same Base Class for each object
You need to modify the private variables, which can not be public in any case
If these are true, then it is probably necessary to use inheritance.
There is nothing bad in using reason 1, it is very good thing to have a solid interface on your objects. This can be done using composition or with inheritance, no problem - if this interface is simple and does not change. Usually inheritance is quite effective here.
If the reason is number 2 it gets a bit tricky. Do you really only need to use the same base class? In general, just using the same base class is not good enough, but it may be a requirement of your framework, a design consideration which can not be avoided.
However, if you want to use the private variables, the case 3, then you may be in trouble. If you consider global variables unsafe, then you should consider using inheritance to get access to private variables also unsafe. Mind you, global variables are not all THAT bad - databases are essentially big set of global variables. But if you can handle it, then it's quite fine.

Aside from is a/has a considerations, one must also consider the "depth" of inheritance your object has to go through. Anything beyond five or six levels of inheritance deep might cause unexpected casting and boxing/unboxing problems, and in those cases it might be wise to compose your object instead.

When you have an is-a relation between two classes (example dog is a canine), you go for inheritance.
On the other hand when you have has-a or some adjective relationship between two classes (student has courses) or (teacher studies courses), you chose composition.

A simple way to make sense of this would be that inheritance should be used when you need an object of your class to have the same interface as its parent class, so that it can thereby be treated as an object of the parent class (upcasting). Moreover, function calls on a derived class object would remain the same everywhere in code, but the specific method to call would be determined at runtime (i.e. the low-level implementation differs, the high-level interface remains the same).
Composition should be used when you do not need the new class to have the same interface, i.e. you wish to conceal certain aspects of the class' implementation which the user of that class need not know about. So composition is more in the way of supporting encapsulation (i.e. concealing the implementation) while inheritance is meant to support abstraction (i.e. providing a simplified representation of something, in this case the same interface for a range of types with different internals).

Subtyping is appropriate and more powerful where the invariants can be enumerated, else use function composition for extensibility.

I agree with #Pavel, when he says, there are places for composition and there are places for inheritance.
I think inheritance should be used if your answer is an affirmative to any of these questions.
Is your class part of a structure that benefits from polymorphism ? For example, if you had a Shape class, which declares a method called draw(), then we clearly need Circle and Square classes to be subclasses of Shape, so that their client classes would depend on Shape and not on specific subclasses.
Does your class need to re-use any high level interactions defined in another class ? The template method design pattern would be impossible to implement without inheritance. I believe all extensible frameworks use this pattern.
However, if your intention is purely that of code re-use, then composition most likely is a better design choice.

Inheritance is a very powerfull machanism for code reuse. But needs to be used properly. I would say that inheritance is used correctly if the subclass is also a subtype of the parent class. As mentioned above, the Liskov Substitution Principle is the key point here.
Subclass is not the same as subtype. You might create subclasses that are not subtypes (and this is when you should use composition). To understand what a subtype is, lets start giving an explanation of what a type is.
When we say that the number 5 is of type integer, we are stating that 5 belongs to a set of possible values (as an example, see the possible values for the Java primitive types). We are also stating that there is a valid set of methods I can perform on the value like addition and subtraction. And finally we are stating that there are a set of properties that are always satisfied, for example, if I add the values 3 and 5, I will get 8 as a result.
To give another example, think about the abstract data types, Set of integers and List of integers, the values they can hold are restricted to integers. They both support a set of methods, like add(newValue) and size(). And they both have different properties (class invariant), Sets does not allow duplicates while List does allow duplicates (of course there are other properties that they both satisfy).
Subtype is also a type, which has a relation to another type, called parent type (or supertype). The subtype must satisfy the features (values, methods and properties) of the parent type. The relation means that in any context where the supertype is expected, it can be substitutable by a subtype, without affecting the behaviour of the execution. Let’s go to see some code to exemplify what I’m saying. Suppose I write a List of integers (in some sort of pseudo language):
class List {
data = new Array();
Integer size() {
return data.length;
}
add(Integer anInteger) {
data[data.length] = anInteger;
}
}
Then, I write the Set of integers as a subclass of the List of integers:
class Set, inheriting from: List {
add(Integer anInteger) {
if (data.notContains(anInteger)) {
super.add(anInteger);
}
}
}
Our Set of integers class is a subclass of List of Integers, but is not a subtype, due to it is not satisfying all the features of the List class. The values, and the signature of the methods are satisfied but the properties are not. The behaviour of the add(Integer) method has been clearly changed, not preserving the properties of the parent type. Think from the point of view of the client of your classes. They might receive a Set of integers where a List of integers is expected. The client might want to add a value and get that value added to the List even if that value already exist in the List. But her wont get that behaviour if the value exists. A big suprise for her!
This is a classic example of an improper use of inheritance. Use composition in this case.
(a fragment from: use inheritance properly).

Even though Composition is preferred, I would like to highlight pros of Inheritance and cons of Composition.
Pros of Inheritance:
It establishes a logical "IS A" relation. If Car and Truck are two types of Vehicle ( base class), child class IS A base class.
i.e.
Car is a Vehicle
Truck is a Vehicle
With inheritance, you can define/modify/extend a capability
Base class provides no implementation and sub-class has to override complete method (abstract) => You can implement a contract
Base class provides default implementation and sub-class can change the behaviour => You can re-define contract
Sub-class adds extension to base class implementation by calling super.methodName() as first statement => You can extend a contract
Base class defines structure of the algorithm and sub-class will override a part of algorithm => You can implement Template_method without change in base class skeleton
Cons of Composition:
In inheritance, subclass can directly invoke base class method even though it's not implementing base class method because of IS A relation. If you use composition, you have to add methods in container class to expose contained class API
e.g. If Car contains Vehicle and if you have to get price of the Car, which has been defined in Vehicle, your code will be like this
class Vehicle{
protected double getPrice(){
// return price
}
}
class Car{
Vehicle vehicle;
protected double getPrice(){
return vehicle.getPrice();
}
}

A rule of thumb I have heard is inheritance should be used when its a "is-a" relationship and composition when its a "has-a". Even with that I feel that you should always lean towards composition because it eliminates a lot of complexity.

As many people told, I will first start with the check - whether there exists an "is-a" relationship. If it exists I usually check the following:
Whether the base class can be instantiated. That is, whether the base class can be non-abstract. If it can be non-abstract I usually prefer composition
E.g 1. Accountant is an Employee. But I will not use inheritance because a Employee object can be instantiated.
E.g 2. Book is a SellingItem. A SellingItem cannot be instantiated - it is abstract concept. Hence I will use inheritacne. The SellingItem is an abstract base class (or interface in C#)
What do you think about this approach?
Also, I support #anon answer in Why use inheritance at all?
The main reason for using inheritance is not as a form of composition - it is so you can get polymorphic behaviour. If you don't need polymorphism, you probably should not be using inheritance.
#MatthieuM. says in https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/12439/code-smell-inheritance-abuse/12448#comment303759_12448
The issue with inheritance is that it can be used for two orthogonal purposes:
interface (for polymorphism)
implementation (for code reuse)
REFERENCE
Which class design is better?
Inheritance vs. Aggregation

Composition v/s Inheritance is a wide subject. There is no real answer for what is better as I think it all depends on the design of the system.
Generally type of relationship between object provide better information to choose one of them.
If relation type is "IS-A" relation then Inheritance is better approach.
otherwise relation type is "HAS-A" relation then composition will better approach.
Its totally depend on entity relationship.

How many listeners are too many observer pattern?

My class were inheriting from two Listeners already. And I need to add one more listener. It became something like below:
class DatabaseManager : public DatabaseChangeListener,
public PropertyChangeListener,
public RenumberListener
Should I avoid too many observers? Even though listeners are abstract classes it bothers me a bit that I am using multiple inheritance. I am curious has any one had experienced something like; because too many observers code became complex and buggy ?

The major signs of smell here are the fact that your class is called DatabaseManager (sounds like a god-object), and also the specialized tone that the interfaces have to them (e.g.RenumberListener).
There's nothing inherently wrong with supporting several event hooks, nor with multiple inheritance in and of itself. You might just need to group some interfaces into one clear one that describes what your class does, its basic right to exist, who uses it, and for what purpose.
Also note, implementing an interface is a type of functionality directed at the consumers of the class. If there's no need for generic interfaces, it's better not to have them, for otherwise you might find yourself with an interface per member function in the system at one extreme, and at the other, no clear guideline on what makes an interface and what doesn't.

If you want to reduce the number of classes, you can try to abstract away the different type of messages your listening to by creating a basic listener interface, e.g.,
virtual void onEvent(Subject * subject, Message * message) = 0;
Then you register your DatabaseManager for different type of events? This way you can still use single inheritance. I know that system like Qt etc use this for dispatching events.
But as far as I know, if your base classes (DatabaseChangeListener, PropertyChangeListener and RenumberListener) are pure abstract, you will not encounter problems with multiple inheritance.

Don't use inheritance. Implement one listener interface and use onEvent method to handle it passing event to different handlers. Subscribe your object on different event types. This way you can easily change any events and handlers without changing your DatabaseManager. Even new events doesn't require much from DatabaseManager.
Consider using something like Chain of Responsibility to make your manager class fully undependable of event types. It could use just a chain of IHandler objects, which can be injected in constructor

Differences between Strategy Pattern and Inheritance

There is a same concept for Strategy Pattern and Inheritance, so I can implement Strategy Pattern with Inheritance that sounds it is simpler and cleaner than Strategy Pattern.
Startegy Pattern:
class IBase
{
public:
virtual void processAction(void *data) = 0; // pure virtual
}
class Worker: public IBase
{
public:
virtual void processAction(void *data)
{
// define logic
}
}
Inheritance:
class Base
{
public:
virtual void processAction(void *data) {}
}
class Worker: public Base
{
public:
virtual void processAction(void *data) override
{
// define logic
}
}
My question is what is the difference between them? or when should I use Strategy Pattern or Inheritance?
Link: Strategy Pattern

Imagine you design a Cache. The cache can have options regarding
eviction policy (LIFO, FIFO, LRU)
expiration policy (after read, after write)
maximum size (number of elements, memory usage)
Now imagine you want to let the user of your cache choose any of these options, and you use inheritance. You'll need 3 * 2 * 2 = 12 different classes:
LifoAfterReadNumberOfElementsBasedCache,
LifoAfterReadMemoryBasedCache,
etc.
Each of the 4 LifoXxx classes will have to implement the same algorithm to implement the LIFO strategy. Same for the other ones.
Implement it with the strategy pattern instead of inheritance, and you'll have a single Cache class, and 7 strategy classes (one for each strategy), that you can combine however you want, and without code duplication.
And you can also let the user of your Cache define its own strategy, that you haven't anticipated, and let him combine it with other strategies without needing to create a whole lot of new subclasses.

Strategy is a pattern of OOP and Inheritance is a principle of OOP. Strategy is implemented using (or to support) Inheritance (actually, interface generalization).
Inheritance
Inheritance is used to achieve all benefits of OOP (it eventually
leads to better readbility\maintainability\structure of code).
Inheritance is used to form many other patterns, not only Strategy
Inheritance is sometimes a limitation because of its static compile-time nature
Strategy
Strategy assumes to have different implementations which can be replaced in runtime (or configured in a flexible way). So, your first example is not strategy as well.
In general, composition (which is implemented by Strategy) as a way of logic reuse is preferred over inheritance. At first, it provided dynamic polymorphism. At second, it has less implementation limitations like multi-class inheritance, etc.
Strategy corresponds to "some changeable algorithm" in terms of DDD, thus has real impact on domain modelling.
Strategy, as a pattern itself, provides a language ("pattern language") for communication between developers.
Moreover, according to your example:
Base abstract class and interface have two different semantics, thus inheritance in your example have different semantics too. First is about implementation of public contract. Second is about generalization as an extraction of common properties and methods.

The answer is in the Wikipedia article you linked in your question.
The strategy pattern uses composition instead of inheritance. In the strategy pattern, behaviors are defined as separate interfaces and specific classes that implement these interfaces. This allows better decoupling between the behavior and the class that uses the behavior. The behavior can be changed without breaking the classes that use it, and the classes can switch between behaviors by changing the specific implementation used without requiring any significant code changes. Behaviors can also be changed at run-time as well as at design-time.
If your situation is simple and static, you certainly can use inheritance, but using Strategy allows you to better decouple complex code and allows simple switching between implementations of the strategy, even at run-time.
Examples may help. There are some good ones in the answers to this related question as well as in the other answers to your question.
A very real situation where you want the ability to change strategy at run-time is in sorting. The sort order can be varied by a strategy (commonly called a Comparator), and you can have multiple implementations of the strategy and mechanisms for the user of your program to change them.

If we are talking about Java, you can consider also the “Composition over inheritance” approach from Effective Java. This will help you with the method invocation, because inheritance violates encapsulation (in general perspective). By choosing composition you can extend your abstraction even further, because it provides you with the ground for Service instance you need.

Decorator design pattern vs. inheritance?

I've read the decorator design pattern from Wikipedia, and code example from this site.
I see the point that traditional inheritance follows an 'is-a' pattern whereas decorator follows a 'has-a' pattern. And the calling convention of decorator looks like a 'skin' over 'skin' .. over 'core'. e.g.
I* anXYZ = new Z( new Y( new X( new A ) ) );
as demonstrated in above code example link.
However there are still a couple of questions that I do not understand:
what does wiki mean by 'The decorator pattern can be used to extend (decorate) the functionality of a certain object at run-time'? the 'new ...(new... (new...))' is a run-time call and is good but a 'AwithXYZ anXYZ;' is a inheritance at compile time and is bad?
from the code example link I can see that the number of class definition is almost the same in both implementations. I recall in some other design pattern books like 'Head first design patterns'. They use starbuzz coffee as example and say traditional inheritance will cause a 'class explosion' because for each combination of coffee, you would come up with a class for it.
But isn't it the same for decorator in this case? If a decorator class can take ANY abstract class and decorate it, then I guess it does prevent explosion, but from the code example, you have exact # of class definitions, no less...
Would anyone explain?

Let's take some abstract streams for example and imagine you want to provide encryption and compression services over them.
With decorator you have (pseudo code):
Stream plain = Stream();
Stream encrypted = EncryptedStream(Stream());
Stream zipped = ZippedStream(Stream());
Stream zippedEncrypted = ZippedStream(EncryptedStream(Stream());
Stream encryptedZipped = EncryptedStream(ZippedStream(Stream());
With inheritance, you have:
class Stream() {...}
class EncryptedStream() : Stream {...}
class ZippedStream() : Stream {...}
class ZippedEncryptedStream() : EncryptedStream {...}
class EncryptedZippedStream() : ZippedStream {...}
1) with decorator, you combine the functionality at runtime, depending on your needs. Each class only takes care of one facet of functionality (compression, encryption, ...)
2) in this simple example, we have 3 classes with decorators, and 5 with inheritance. Now let's add some more services, e.g. filtering and clipping. With decorator you need just 2 more classes to support all possible scenarios, e.g. filtering -> clipping -> compression -> encription.
With inheritance, you need to provide a class for each combination so you end up with tens of classes.

In reverse order:
2) With, say, 10 different independent extensions, any combination of which might be needed at run time, 10 decorator classes will do the job. To cover all possibilities by inheritance you'd need 1024 subclasses. And there'd be no way of getting around massive code redundancy.
1) Imagine you had those 1024 subclasses to choose from at run time. Try to sketch out the code that would be needed. Bear in mind that you might not be able to dictate the order in which options are picked or rejected. Also remember that you might have to use an instance for a while before extending it. Go ahead, try. Doing it with decorators is trivial by comparison.

You are correct that they can be very similar at times. The applicability and benefits of either solution will depend on your situation.
Others have beat me to adequate answers to your second question. In short it is that you can combine decorators to achieve more combinations which you cannot do with inheritance.
As such I focus on the first:
You cannot strictly say compile-time is bad and run-time is good, it is just different flexibility. The ability to change things at run-time can be important for some projects because it allows changes without recompilation which can be slow and requires you be in an environment where you can compile.
An example where you cannot use inheritance, is when you want to add functionality to an instantiated object. Suppose you are provided an instance of an object that implements a logging interface:
public interface ILog{
//Writes string to log
public void Write( string message );
}
Now suppose you begin a complicated task that involves many objects and each of them does logging so you pass along the logging object. However you want every message from the task to be prefixed with the task Name and Task Id. You could pass around a function, or pass along the Name and Id and trust every caller to follow the rule of pre-pending that information, or you could decorate the logging object before passing it along and not have to worry about the other objects doing it right
public class PrependLogDecorator : ILog{
ILog decorated;
public PrependLogDecorator( ILog toDecorate, string messagePrefix ){
this.decorated = toDecorate;
this.prefix = messagePrefix;
}
public void Write( string message ){
decorated.Write( prefix + message );
}
}
Sorry about the C# code but I think it will still communicate the ideas to someone who knows C++

To address the second part of your question (which might in turn address your first part), using the decorator method you have access to the same number of combinations, but don't have to write them. If you have 3 layers of decorators with 5 options at each level, you have 5*5*5 possible classes to define using inheritance. Using the decorator method you need 15.

First off, I'm a C# person and haven't dealt with C++ in a while, but hopefully you get where I'm coming from.
A good example that comes to mind is a DbRepository and a CachingDbRepository:
public interface IRepository {
object GetStuff();
}
public class DbRepository : IRepository {
public object GetStuff() {
//do something against the database
}
}
public class CachingDbRepository : IRepository {
public CachingDbRepository(IRepository repo){ }
public object GetStuff() {
//check the cache first
if(its_not_there) {
repo.GetStuff();
}
}
So, if I just used inheritance, I'd have a DbRepository and a CachingDbRepository. The DbRepository would query from a database; the CachingDbRepository would check its cache and if the data wasn't there, it would query a database. So there's a possible duplicate implementation here.
By using the decorator pattern, I still have the same number of classes, but my CachingDbRepository takes in a IRepository and calls its GetStuff() to get the data from the underlying repo if it's not in the cache.
So the number of classes are the same, but the use of the classes are related. CachingDbRepo calls the Repo that was passed into it...so it's more like composition over inheritance.
I find it subjective when to decide when to use just inheritance over decoration.
I hope this helps. Good luck!

data access object pattern implementation

I would like to implement a data access object pattern in C++, but preferably without using multiple inheritance and/or boost (which my client does not like).
Do you have any suggestions?

OTL (otl.sourceforge.net) is an excellent C++ database library. It's a single include file so doesn't have all the complexity associated (rightly or wrongly!) with Boost.
In terms of the DAO itself, you have many options. The simplest that hides the database implementation is just to use C++ style interfaces and implement the data access layer in a particular implementation.
class MyDAO {
// Pure virtual functions to access the data itself
}
class MyDAOImpl : public MyDAO {
// Implementations to get the data from the database
}

A quick google search on data access object design patterns will return at least 10 results on the first page that will be useful. The most common of these is the abstract interface design as already shown by Jeff Foster. The only thing you may wish to add to this is a data access object factory to create your objects.
Most of the examples I could find with decent code are in Java, it's a common design pattern in Java, but they're still very relevant to C++ and you could use them quite easily.
This is a good link, it describes the abstract factory very well.

My preferred data access abstraction is the Repository Pattern.