September 10, 2015 | Andrew Lawlor

As Dreamforce 2015 approaches next week, Salesforce recently announced the upcoming 2016 release of its redesigned CRM platform, called Lightning.

This is actually the second Lightning release; its initial version, for the Salesforce1 mobile platform, was released this past winter. Now Salesforce is adding even more functionality, redesigning the complete user experience and making the Lightning products more widely available. Let’s find out more about Lightning.

Lightning empowers developers, business analysts, and Salesforce administrators to build apps quickly without writing code. Lightning is a set of development tools that include:

• Lightning Experience: a modern, productive user experience designed to help you do more and be more efficient.
• Lightning App Builder: a visual user interface designer.
• Lightning Components: reusable user interface building blocks.
• Lightning Apps: created using sets of components.

Lightning will dramatically improve the experience of Salesforce users, delivering a cleaner, more mobile-friendly interface with faster data processing.

For developers, Lightning Components will provide opportunity to develop more robust apps.

The classic Salesforce user interface consists of a Visualforce framework that provides a robust set of tags that are resolved at the server-side and that work alongside standard or custom controllers to make database and other operations simple to implement.

Lightning components are part of the new Salesforce user interface framework for developing dynamic web applications for desktop and mobile devices. They use JavaScript at the client-side and Apex at the server-side to provide the data and business logic. This framework is a component-based framework. As building blocks of an app, components encapsulate HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, while interacting via events.

Lightning components are client-side centric, making them more dynamic and mobile friendly.

Visualforce components, on the other hand, are page-centric and rely heavily on server calls. Visualforce facilitates delivering of template-driven web pages and email messages, making it suitable for developers who wish to maintain greater control over the lifecycle of the request.

There is a big discussion in developer forums whether Lightning Components are better than Visualforce. Technically yes, Lightning components are better since its stateless but the Winter 16 release which will roll out all these new features, the components are not highly usable from Web Apps point of view.

Lightning Framework was introduced last year with the focus on Salesforce1/mobile apps, and although Salesforce claims that Lightning components will be available to be used in standalone apps in the Winter 2016 release, it still appears that Salesforce has a long way to go before developers will adopt Lightning Framework to build web apps on Salesforce. You can create a stand-alone Lightning app with a set of components interacting with each other in the current release. But just like building real-world applications like Force.com, that bridge is still to be crossed with Lightning framework.

If you plan to build a collection of custom tabs, objects, fields, etc. within the new Lightning Experience, you will be able to edit those pages using Lightning App Builder in a future release. If you want the app to run 100% outside the Salesforce container, meaning that it’s not using any of standard navigation elements, styling, etc., you can use Lightning framework to build a web app. It will be component driven, but you’ll have to build all the elements. You can see this by going to the dev console and choose “New> Lightning App.” Embedding the components in VF will be done via code in future releases.

If you are building a Salesforce1 Mobile Application, we would recommend you to use Lightning Components and Apps. But for building customized desktop apps, we still recommend using traditional Visualforce.

For a deeper conversation about what the new Salesforce Lightning will mean for developers, feel free to reach out.

Photo Credit: Salesforce