Salesforce Lightning Web Components: The new way of creating robust components for modern browsers

Salesforce has been on a great journey with the Lightning modules. In 2014, Salesforce had launched the Lightning component framework that was supported by the Aura programming framework. However, in those days, the web standards offered limited feasibility and were unable to build large-scale web applications. As a result, the Aura framework provided a component-driven model that enabled developers to create large-scale client applications on the web.

As time passed, the web stack, comprising of operating systems, programming languages, database software, and web servers, experienced a remarkable level of innovation and standardization that transformed it from a basic page-rendering platform to a full-fledged web development platform and today it is popularly known as Lightning Web Components. This blog post aims to help you gain a deeper understanding of Salesforce’s Lightning Web Components and why they make a better choice for your organizational needs.

What Are Web Components and Why Are They Important?

Before we get to understand the importance of Salesforce Lightning Web Components, let’s understand what exactly are web components? In brief, web components are a series of web platform APIs that helps you create new custom, reusable, and encapsulated HTML tags for use in web pages and web apps. Custom components and widgets that are built using the web component standards work across modern browsers as well as are used with any JavaScript library or frameworks using HTML.

You can now build Lightning components using two programming models – the Lightning Web Components and the original Aura Components. Lightning Web Components are custom HTML elements that are built using HTML and JavaScript. Lightning web components and Aura components may coexist and interact on a page resulting as both admins and end-users appearing as Lightning Components.

Lightning Web Components uses core Web Components standards and only offers what is required to perform well in the Salesforce-supported browsers. Since it’s based on code that runs natively in browsers, Lightning Web Components is lightweight and delivers outstanding performance. Also, the majority of the code you write is using standard JavaScript and HTML.

Don't forget to check out: Getting Started with Salesforce Lightning Components and Record Pages

The idea of being able to write reusable and portable code is not new and Salesforce knows it quite well. This was the main driving force behind the new features introduced in Lightning Web Components. This approach offers to create varieties of components that are reusable, maintainable, sustainable, and independent. Most importantly, Salesforce Lightning Web Components provide a formulation of the mechanism to make the development of web components easier, faster, and more appropriate for any developer.

Why Using Lightning Web Components is a Better Choice

1. Performance Enhancements

As there is no added abstraction layer, Lightning Web Components is most likely to render faster and provide better performance leading to deliverability.

2. Faster Loading of Websites

Similar to Lightning, Lightning Web Components is faster in loading the developed components and is a lightweight framework built using web standards.

3. Improved Web Standards

Lightning Web Components has built-in browser security features from Web Components Standards, allowing out-of-box usage and fewer custom functions. With Lightning Web Components, the more we learn about web standards, the more we have the skills that can be used in other technologies.

4. Common Components

Using Lightning Web Components, it is now easy to write components that do not have a user interface and those components can be reused in other components that are more powerful than static tools.

5. Simple to Learn

Lightning Web Components are basically taking form through the native web standards in the browser. Meaning there is no added abstraction layer required like Aura Framework or any other framework, just JavaScript needs to be created.

6. Easier Pathway for Developers

No additional framework is required to learn with a view to creating Lightning Web Components and therefore the transition for developers is much easier.

7. Better Security, Testing and Browser Compatibility

With Lightning Web Components, CSS (Cascading style sheets), Script, and more the event range are better and more limited. Each of these offers more consistency in the design of components. Furthermore, Lightning Web Components supports two-way data binding that facilitates the co-ordination of how data moves between components.

Here’s a Use Case on Salesforce For The Manufacturing Industry For Better Understanding

A leading provider of car manufacturing products, equipment, and network systems related to automobile facilities was looking forward to improving the UI components of their websites that offer for the variety of spare parts products. They were facing delays in site opening due to slower downloading components and wanted better performance enhancements. Moreover, they realized their current framework offered limited components for site management and they wanted more options to speed up visibility about their automobile spare parts products and services.

They were in definite need of a technology upgrade of Salesforce Lightning Web Components to resolve their challenges. And after a successful implementation of the Salesforce Lightning Web Component, they gained the features and ability to perform well in supported browsers. They are now able to render their sites faster involving a minimal amount of custom codes. Moreover, since Salesforce Lightning Web Components offers a richer API-based for the UI, they also gained better performance. In short, the increased performance of Lightning Web Components and improved productivity of experts can result in faster deployment of new components and happy customers.

Check out another amazing blog by Softweb Solutions here: Understanding The True Potential of Salesforce Integration With SAP

Here Are Some of The Benefits Achieved by Implementing Salesforce Lightning Web Components

• Standardizes the entire architecture and allows to create web components faster for pages
• Permits to reuse the codes for faster deployments
• Supports quality assurance testing for all units before it goes live
• Eases the process of creating a lightning page
• Implements lightning components with just clicks in business applications
• Experiences smooth run of components without browser interference and enhance performance

Final Thoughts

Salesforce Lightning Web Components are designed to help developers meet the new JavaScript coding standards and to prevent them from using old features that lead to outdated and complicating coding. Besides, when organizations start using Lightning Web Components their UI performance increases significantly with modern browsers that support the latest code standards. If you wish to learn more about extensive Salesforce setup, configuration, and integration, simply leverage our Salesforce consulting services. Our Salesforce experts are dedicated to suggesting the best development option.