Salesforce is opening up its Lightning Web Components to a wider developer audience. The company has announced the JavaScript framework is now open sourced, expanding developers’ ability to create web components across a variety of platforms.
“Open-source software empowers developers to examine the source code and enhance it with contributions based on their own insights and experience,” said Arnal Dayaratna, research director for software development at IDC. “By open sourcing Lightning Web Components, Salesforce is giving enterprises the ability to take advantage of the enhanced innovation enabled by open-source software and accelerate application development at a time when the demand for digital solutions exceeds the supply of developers to produce those solutions.”
According to Salesforce, Lightning Web Components are custom elements built with HTML and modern JavaScript. The framework is based off of core Web Component standards, and provides only the features necessary for performing well in browsers. “Because it’s built on code that runs natively in browsers, the framework is lightweight and delivers exceptional performance. Most of the code you write is standard JavaScript and HTML,” the company wrote.
The project consists of three parts:
- The Lightning Web Components framework
- The base lightning components, which provides more than 70 UI components
- Salesforce Bindings for declarative and imperative access into Salesforce data, meta data, data chacine and data synchronization.
“In the past, developers often had to use different frameworks to build different sides of an application. For example, you’d use Aura to build the employee-facing side of an application on Salesforce and React, Angular or Vue to build the customer engagement side of the application on Heroku or any other platform,” Salesforce wrote in a blog. “Today, you can use Lightning Web Components to build both sides of the application. The benefits are significant: you only need to learn a single framework and you can share code between apps. And because Lightning Web Components is built on the latest web standards, you know you are using a cutting-edge framework based on the latest patterns and best practices.”
