Original subtitles

Now that's it for this introduction

to class-based components.

I showed you that they exist, how they work

and how you write your own ones,

how you work with prompts and the render method,

how you work with state, and also how you work

with these life cycle methods for side effects

and we also had a look at how you use context.

You can build your entire application

with class-based components if you want to.

That is absolutely fine.

And in the past, as I mentioned, you had to use them

in some cases.

But in modern React apps, you typically

stick to functional components instead,

simply because they are leaner and more flexible,

as you learned throughout this module.

That's why I also started with functional components

in this course now, because the React Echo system

transitioned to functional components as the main thing

and that's why I focus on functional components

in this course.

Also, going forward, for the rest of this course,

functional components will be the focus

and I will only occasionally show you

how to work with class-based components.

Nonetheless, I wanna emphasize that you don't have to use

functional components, it is fine to use class-based ones

if you prefer them,

but chances are that you also see the benefits

of functional components, and therefore it is fine

to generally ignore class-based components.

With one exception, to which I'll come back to

in a couple of minutes.

Now if you're not sure which approach to use,

if you're not sure whether you wanna go with class-based

or functional components, here's a little

helper decision tree, if you wanna call it like that.

As a general rule, you should simply prefer

functional components and you should instead

use class-based components if you personally prefer them

so if you disagree, if you like them,

of course you can use them, there's nothing wrong with them.

If you are working on a project or if you're in a team

where there are a lot of class-based components being used,

you might not have a choice then and you might be

confusing your colleagues if you start working

with functional components only,

and you also should use, and you must use,

class-based components if you're building error boundaries.

Now, that's something we haven't learned yet,

but that's exactly what we're going to take a look at

in the next lecture now.