Any good reason for using lightning component

Question

I know in the trailhead there is a comparison between Visualforce and lightning component. And I even made an answer to one question about this the other day.

But the question is, nowadays, most of us are not actually using much Visualforce tags in our Visualforce pages, it is pretty much an html page wrapped inside Visualforce. And for the client side logic, we can use frameworks like React, Angular or backbone.

So my question is, is there any good reason for us to use lightning? Or is it truly better? Frameworks like React, Angular or backbone have much more github tools supporting them, a bigger community and thus more built in tools. For example, consider adding filtering, sorting and pagination to a datatable in Angular or React, and then consider adding it in lightning component, the former is obviously much easier.

One good reason for using lightning component is it can be very componental. However, this can be achieved via other frameworks as well, although in a less decent way - using static resource. Is there any other good reason to use lightning?

Answer 1

It really depends on your business Scenario of what you are trying to achieve and your UX approach and design decisions .If you want your users to completely align to standard lightning experience going lightning components route will benefit them in long term

If you are in ISV space ,then you want to try and use lightning component framework to provide end users(Your end users are other salesforce orgs where your apps are installed) flexibility to use the builders that salesforce out of box provides .

Building with React or Angular will imply admins or business consultants wont be able to configure or control the layout .Lets say you provide that ability then you are rebuilding the builders that salesforce has already built for you .

Salesforce is trying to provide a framework that does handle lot of things for you OOB .Lightning Action Services are great step towards that where salesforce will be providing a single tag that handles CRUD respecting org CRUD/FLS and sharing configurations.

In angular or React you are simply rebuilding lot of stuff that platform automatically gives in lightning component framework (Examples include Internationalisation , labels, Locale Date formats etc).

If you ask me as of today (22nd oct 2016) its lot better than how it was an year ago and its keep getting better and better .The base components ,Utility bars ,Quick actions , Lightning Out ,Added Interfaces all are pretty robust now to build a functional apps .While there are few gaps being a new technology with a learning curve and not much libraries available open source compatible its an extra pain which i am sure with time it will be sorted .So if you are thinking of future and planning to use salesforce wont be bad idea to go with lightning component framework and If you feel you are invested in SFDC for short term then frameworks like angular or react makes sense as that can be used with any other Technology Stack .

Answer 2

My .02 for what it's worth...

I've never liked Visualforce development. It always felt like either I was wrestling with it to do what I wanted, or that I was faced with using it just as a wrapper for something based on Javascript, React, etc (which I don't know). And if I was going to use it just as a wrapper, I'd rather let dedicated UI and presentation folks write that part and just use APIs I'd write to pass data back and forth.

At Dreamforce 2015, there was a major push for Lightning but it was all new to me. It was overwhelming because I'm not a HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc, person and I didn't see any mature examples of what Lightning Components could do. At Dreamforce 2016, I attended nothing but Lightning sessions so I could wrap my head around what this thing is, and this year could see more mature examples of how everything worked. Everything "clicked" for me.

Now, I've started playing around with it and even though I don't have HTML, CSS, or Javascript skills, I'm slowly starting to figure things out and so far I really like it, and am taking baby steps piecing some components together to see what they can do.

One thing that's a major factor for me is that I work at a small startup and my main customer is a Support team made up of only 4 people, and I have a really good understanding of their workflows. They've been using a Service Cloud console up until now, and while it's usable, they could be a lot more efficient with a custom case management system.

I would never have tackled such a thing with Visualforce (either native or as a wrapper) but with Lightning, I'm really feeling like we can develop exactly what we need, use native Salesforce technologies, and explore mobile options for case management down the road.

Maybe frameworks like React, etc, are better in some way, but I wouldn't know because I don't know those frameworks. But just in my short time working with Lightning, my gut instinct is that it just "feels" right. I can learn it, make it do what I want, and develop a great solution using it for our Support team.

And from a maintenance aspect, there's a lot of appeal for using native Salesforce technologies because down the road if we hire additional Salesforce developers, we don't have to worry so much about finding people skilled in both Salesforce and React/etc, but can concentrate on finding somebody really good at Salesfroce development in general and they could probably pick up on Lightning pretty quickly if they don't already know it (like I am today).

Answer 3

If you must deliver soon, I suggest you keep using VF, which seems to respect ascending compatibility, which Lightning DOES NOT ( 1 year I use lightning, I know what i'm talking about :/ )

Undepending all the benefits provided by client applications ( lightning ) instead of server applications ( vf ), Lightning framework is highly unstable for now, so if you need to put something in production in the next month, DO NOT use lightning.

Just by browsing forums, you can see that each time there is a new update ( most famous one is "LockerService" , any lightning component who used to work perfectly doesn't work anymore) , so except if you want to have to debug your developments before each SFDC platform release ...

Most fun is sometimes you can adapt your code, and sometimes you simply can't , even if you try to rewrite everything, you are forced to wait for new SFDC platform updates , and the answer "it doesn't work but it's not supposed to work" or "use some crappy homemade workaround" comes too often from SFDC :/