Tag: prototype

Understanding JavaScript: Inheritance and the prototype chain

This is the first post in a series on JavaScript. In this post I’m going to explain how JavaScript’s prototype chain works, and how you can use it to achieve inheritance.

First, it’s important to understand that while JavaScript is an object-oriented language, it is prototype-based and does not implement a traditional class system. Keep in mind that when I mention a class in this post, I am simply referring to JavaScript objects and the prototype chain – more on this in a bit.

Almost everything in JavaScript is an object, which you can think of as sort of like associative arrays - objects contain named properties which can be accessed with obj.propName or obj['propName']. Each object has an internal property called prototype, which links to another object. The prototype object has a prototype object of its own, and so on – this is referred to as the prototype chain. If you follow an object’s prototype chain, you will eventually reach the core Object prototype whose prototype is null, signalling the end of the chain.