Inheritance vs. Composition in PHP: Choosing the Right Path for Your Code

When developing applications in PHP, one of the fundamental decisions developers face is how to design relationships between classes. Two common approaches are inheritance and composition. Both techniques allow us to build relationships between classes, but they come with distinct implications and use cases. In this article, we’ll explore the differences between inheritance and composition in PHP, using everyday language and practical code examples to help you make informed decisions in your projects.

Understanding Inheritance

Inheritance is a mechanism that enables a class to inherit properties and behaviors from another class, known as the parent or base class. The derived or child class inherits all the public and protected members of the parent class, promoting code reuse and establishing an “is-a” relationship. Let’s take a real-world example of animals to illustrate inheritance:

class Animal {
    public function eat() {
        return "I am eating!";
    }
}

class Dog extends Animal {
    public function bark() {
        return "Woof!";
    }
}

$dog = new Dog();
echo $dog->eat(); // Output: "I am eating!"
echo $dog->bark(); // Output: "Woof!"

In this example, the Dog class inherits the eat() method from the Animal class. The Dog class…