23

We are planning to put a small team for taking care of our company's Salesforce instance.

Most of the members in this new team do not have experience in Visualforce and as such we are wondering whether we need to give our team training.

With all the hoopla about lightning I am not even sure whether it is worth it to go ahead with the expensive training on Visualforce.

Will Visualforce be outdated and replaced by Lightning in the upcoming months ?

Will Visualforce be relevant at least for a year from now ?

Improve this question
1
  • While any answers may get subjective, to large extend this is a very good and relative question which this community will likely support.
    – Samuel De Rycke
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 6:51

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
22

Visualforce is never going away. The barrier to entry with lightning is far too high for the "anybody can code" group that salesforce really likes to cater to. PDF rendering and email templates are also never going away.

That said, I do see a lot more lightning in the future, but considering how much freedom you get with visualforce (no LockerService, no content security policies, API enabled session, etc.) I'm increasingly a fan of lightning within visualforce if you have no need to blend multiple namespaces.

I'm going to emphasize visualforce much less than I used to, but it has plenty of life left in it when used wisely, and I'd be hesitant to hire somebody without knowledge of it even in orgs that are super into lightning.

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    I have no idea what Salesforce's plans are to support PDFs in the Lightning Experience, but it's very clear that currently, it's impossible to render a PDF from a Lightning page (at present, VF is limited & engine can't do HTML5 or CSS3). Technically, it's something that will be challenging for them to do at all; requiring a completely new render engine. I can see the solution possibly involving a remote application that runs from Heroku or elsewhere.
    – crmprogdev
    Commented May 13, 2016 at 14:47
  • For the most part, it seems like javascript and pdf are almost completely incompatible. It will definitely take a lot of work.
    – Adrian Larson ♦
    Commented May 13, 2016 at 17:07
14

Meta is really for discussions about the SFSE site itself, but then I could also see this question getting closed on the main site and I'd prefer you to get an an answer.

This is going to depend specifically on your instance of Salesforce. You say it's for your company, so it entirely depends on what they're using. If they're using the Lightning Experience now then maybe it is a waste of time to learn Visualforce, but if they're not transitioning for another year or so and need customisations that match the current UI then I do think it's worth one or two members of your team training up in it.

For the most part (quirks aside) Visualforce is easy to learn (especially compared to Lightning) so it shouldn't represent a significant time investment.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .