Intro to JavaScript Classes Class Hierarchy

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will understand the benefits and implications of inheritance in building complex systems.

Class hierarchy

In object-oriented Programming, it’s not uncommon to have several layers of inheritance. The term class hierarchy refers to the layered structure in which classes are arranged.

Imagine you were to create an Airplane class alongside Car. The two classes are likely to share several overlapping properties like make or model. This might warrant creating a new class (perhaps Vehicle) to be a superclass of both the Car and Airplane classes, so that shared properties can be inherited rather than being defined multiple times.

You can start to see how class inheritance may play out in a larger application or system.

Below you can see a simplified class hierarchy for DOM elements: