Mastering JavaScript Design Patterns - Second Edition

Mixins

As we saw much earlier in this book, the inheritance pattern for JavaScript is different from the typical pattern seen in languages like C# and Java. JavaScript uses prototype inheritance that allows adding functions to a class quite easily and from multiple sources. Prototype inheritance allows for adding methods from multiple sources in a similar fashion to the much-maligned multiple-inheritance. The primary criticism of multiple inheritance is that it is difficult to understand which overload of a method will be called in a situation. This problem is somewhat alleviated in a prototype inheritance model. Thus we can feel comfortable using the approach of adding functionality from several sources, which is known as mixins.

A mixin is a ...