You have learned that a component class needs a set of instructions, which tell the component class how to build components. When you make a new component class, these instructions are the body of your class declaration:

class MyComponentClass extends React.Component
{ // everything in between these curly-braces is instructions for how to build components

  render() {
    return <h1>Hello world</h1>;
  }
}

This class declaration results in a new component class, in this case named MyComponentClass. MyComponentClass has one method, named render. This all happens via standard JavaScript class syntax.

You haven’t learned how these instructions actually work to make components! When you make a component by using the expression <MyComponentClass />, what do these instructions do?

Whenever you make a component, that component inherits all of the methods of its component class. MyComponentClass has one method: MyComponentClass.render(). Therefore, <MyComponentClass /> also has a method named render.

You could make a million different <MyComponentClass /> instances, and each one would inherit this same exact render method.

This lesson’s final exercise is to render your component. In order to render a component, that component needs to have a method named render. Your component has this! It inherited a method named render from MyComponentClass.

Since your component has a render method, all that’s left to do is call it. This happens in a slightly unusual way.

To call a component’s render method, you pass that component to ReactDOM.render(). Notice your component, being passed as ReactDOM.render()‘s first argument:

ReactDOM.render(
  <MyComponentClass />,
  document.getElementById('app')
);

ReactDOM.render() will tell <MyComponentClass /> to call its render method.

<MyComponentClass /> will call its render method, which will return the JSX element <h1>Hello world</h1>. ReactDOM.render() will then take that resulting JSX element, and add it to the virtual DOM. This will make “Hello world” appear on the screen.