Post 1 – Building Your First Lightning Web Component for Salesforce Series

This will be the first of a series of posts I will be doing over the next few weeks. They will all lead up to the introduction of my new course titled, “Building Your First Lightning Web Component for Salesforce” from Pluralsight.

Introducing Lightning Web Components

Lightning Web Components is a new programming model from Salesforce,  introduced in January 2019 that takes advantage of all the latest web standards. It should be very intuitive and familiar for any modern web developers, but it will still be fully interoperable with Aura Components (which is what Salesforce used to call lightning components.

The best thing about them is that they are super lightweight and highly performant. In most cases, they should render faster than any Aura equivalents.

In most cases, they should render faster than any Aura equivalents.

Why Are LWC’s Faster?

Aura components were developed back in 2014 and a LOT has changed in the web development world since then. Most notably is the fact that most of today’s web browsers finally support the more advanced versions of JavaScript.

Rather than have to carry the overhead of an additional framework (which is what Aura has to do), LWC’s just rely on accepted web standards. LWC’s are based on a world wide accepted standard known as Web Components.

Get Ready to Play

So now that you know why LWC’s are so cool, I want to direct you to a great place where you can learn more about them and get a chance to play with the code. LWC’s come with a fancy new online playground that you can use to get started learning more about LWC’s. It works kind of like JSFiddle and CodePen.

Going to it will load up a very simple application, but you can use this playground to mock up what your new LWC app will look like.

You can even save any changes you make here and then share what you built with other people by giving them a shareable link.

In the next post, I will be going over what you need to do to setup your own development environment so that you can start building LWC’s today.