Salesforce

Salesforce Lightning Web Components: Joining the OSS bandwagon

Publish Date: September 7, 2020

Free, libre, and open-source software (FLOSS) is ubiquitous and omnipresent. We rely on them whether we know it or not. It is on our phones, routers, cars, supercomputers, smartwatches, the server making this blog post visible, and even the browser you are using to read it.
Salesforce is no exception.

In the past blogs on SFDC (Salesforce dot com), we touched upon the beneficial capabilities for businesses, and how certain core components such as SFDX (Salesforce Developer Experience) have changed the application game Today, we will dive into why Salesforce joining the OSS (Open Source Software) bandwagon with Lightning Web Components (LWC) can be a gamechanger for innovation in businesses.

Why open source mattersOpen-source frameworks draw meaning from the popular principle: “The smartest people across every field are never going to be the ones in your own company.” Being an ‘open-source citizen’ company, Salesforce’s Lightning Web Components allows enterprises to build trusted products faster. Rather than having to reinvent the wheel, businesses can use the pre-existing software developed in the open, tested, and run by companies and people. Consuming and complying to open source is almost becoming business-as-usual. As per the Red Hat’s latest report, ‘The State of Enterprise Open Source’, 95% of the respondents deem open source to be of strategic importance[1]. The same report reveals that lowered TCO remains the highest-ranked benefits of enterprise open source.

It was therefore inevitable that with the rise of open-source, its long-time consumer Salesforce would join the OSS bandwagon. Salesforce developers introduced Lightning Web Components or LWC, which said sayonara to the original ‘Aura’ and ‘Lightning Component’ – both not built to leverage the recent advances in modern web technologies. A few of the advantages it offered:

Improved third-party API support
Fast and light-weight.
Higher security, better testing, and enhanced browser compatibility.

Designed from the ground-up, and Salesforce Open Sources LWC helps extend the power of its JavaScript framework to any external platform. Let us understand how it helps businesses.

Why Lightning Web Components for business? // One framework, many platformsOpen Source Software benefits the company, and its people as any new technology or ideas can jumpstart new opportunities in production and operations. Remote working on codes collaboratively is a unique skill set which naturally improves writing codes, accelerating innovation, hiring, and onboarding. A code, which is meant to be open-source typically associates with good quality software/product design – it is modular, extensible, well documented, and allows teams to depend on it with confidence. Better code, therefore, associates with better software/products.

The reason Salesforce is allowing coders to freely dig deep into the code and understand it inside-out is so that innovative solutions can benefit the whole ecosystem. And for end-users, LWC delivers enhancements in user-centric design and experience – they look great and run fast. A huge benefit of LWC (on top of all the OSS benefits) is that you can run web components with frameworks much closer to the browser engine itself – making the end product a great experience for anyone.

Moreover, the LWC framework does not have any dependencies on the Salesforce platform. On the contrary, Salesforce-led services get built on top of this framework. This layered architecture means that enterprises can use the framework to create and run web apps that run everywhere.
The benefits are significant. A single framework allows you to share code between apps. And given LWC is built on the latest web standards, the framework is already cutting-edge with the latest best practices and patterns. Consequently, which means enterprises everywhere are empowered to quickly build fast, secure, and portable web applications with the same standards-based framework, and using the tools and open languages of their choice.

As a Salesforce partner, YASH Technologies has experience in enhancing the abilities of business functions with Lightning Web Components. We have been able to take advantage of innovations fuelled and enabled by the open-source world to accelerate application development and deployment as per changing times.

Keep watching this space for the next blog, as we explore the benefits to reap with Salesforce Einstein, due to being seamlessly integrated with a wide array of Salesforce products.
[1] Red Hat report, 2020