Mastering React Native

Alternate component forms

In React, there are three ways to define a component. The way we've seen so far uses ES2015 classes to define a component and its methods. This is currently the most common method for defining React components and, in fact, the one you'll encounter most often in documentation and in this book.

React.createClass

Before ES2015 and its class syntax became popular and brought into React, the way to define a component was by using the React.createClass function. This function takes as an argument a JavaScript object that describes the component and its methods. This conceptually is very similar to the way we have seen so far, but has some syntactic differences. To demonstrate, let's take a look at what our NewsItem component ...