React.Component vs React.createClass

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The only React.createClass functionality that isn’t supported by MyComponent extends React.Component is mixins.

to do getInitialState() you can do:

class MyComponent extends React.Component {
  constructor(props, context) {
    super(props, context);

    // initial state
    this.state = {
      counter: 0
    };
  }

  ...
}

or if you use a transpiler like babel, you can get

class MyComponent extends React.Component {
  state = {
    counter: 0
  }

  ...
}

Instead of auto-binding provided by createClass, you could explicitly bind using .bind(this) like you have shown above, or use the fat arrow ES6 syntax:

class MyComponent extends React.Component {
  onClick = () => {
    // do something
  }
  ...
}

Instead of putting things in componentWillMount, you could put things in constructor like so:

class MyComponent extends React.Component {
  constructor(props, context) {
    super(props, context);

    // what you would have put in componentWillMount
  }

  ...
}

There are way more details in the React documentation themselves, but basically the only additional functionality that React.createClass buys is mixins, but afaik anything you could have done with mixins can be done with context and higher ordered components.

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