Lightning Components , The Way I look At It.

We have been noticing the talks about lightning, salesforce1 platform, a brand new platform by salesforce. Lightning is an Aura based technology, a component framework.

To understand it better we need to look back and see the way that salesforce did things back in 2006-08, that when salesforce introduced force.com platform.

I come from Siebel CRM, another ERP, I see most of the core CRM capabilities common in both CRM systems. And we have also seen many Siebel CRM customers moved to salesforce for it's Rich Internet Application features and browser compatibility. And not to mention the role of Visualforce page in that. So, what Siebel could not do and salesforce could do is, being able to create WEB applications using Visualforce technology. We know that this is another force.com platform capability which is built using JSF. Visualforce has its own tag library, when the developers write a simple tag like <apex:commandButton action="{!doMe}"..../>, its compiles and returns HTML with jquery which can do proper AJAX. Isnt it great, when you write two lines of code, and in turn you get 200 lines of HTML with javascript? Yes, it is. And the best thing about it is you can import any web technology libraries, after all this is a web application.
With this they killed S-Controls and attracted lots of enterprise businesses.

So what is wrong now!!! we are doing good with VF pages and some JS libraries, we are building Single page applications, SPA, with the aforementioned combination. Then why did they have to go and invent a new technology? Answer is simple, Salesforce is just one step ahead for enterprise solutions and CRM. They take the best in the technology world and use in the platform. Thats how we got Chatter (facebook), flows (Siebel WFs) etc... And when they could not include the new components in the platform they re-wrote the whole thing, This was mentioned by Parker Harris in the dreamforce.  The world is going mobile now, So is the enterprise industry, Salefsorce just has to be the first to make that transformation, make its clients successful.
All these applications use bootstrap for responsive UI and Angular JS for two-way binding. And now Salesforce1 is the result of the efforts to create new technologies like bootstrap/ angular JS together in an enterprise. And we got hit by the Lightning.

It is as simple as that.

IF YOU WANT TO BE STRONG AT BUILDING LIGHTNING COMPONENTS, PLEASE LEARN TO BUILD SIMPLE HTML PAGES WITH BOOTSTRAP, AND LITTLE COMPLICATED PAGES WITH ANGULARJS FIRST.

You dont have to be super good at angular js. Just the basics like how it works and how to do event-handling etc...

Let me get you started here:
https://www.codeschool.com/courses/shaping-up-with-angular-js


And once you are done, look at the TrailHead,
https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead/module/lightning_components

I will also post step-by-step approach...

Prabhan






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