Understanding Salesforce Classic, Lightning Experience, Lightning Component, Lightning Connect and Lightning Design System

Hi All,

First of all, A very Happy New Year 2016 to All of you, may god fulfill all your wishes which could will bring happiness for you, your family and near & dear ones and for the society and community.

Thanks for responding for my last post regarding the “SalesForce Development / SFDC Online Trainings [Lightning / Platform Developer / Admin / Developer / Advance Developer]”.

I received few questions regarding the difference between all of this and mainly as a beginner on Lightning, many of them were for the difference between the Lightning Experience, Lightning Component, Lightning Connect and Lighting Design System.

Salesforce Classic: It's the platform which we are using from long time as standard, Salesforce just named to classify between the new User Interface/Experience and old User Interface/Experience.

Lightning Experience: Lightning Experience is the new, slick user interface for the desktop browser UI. The initial release of the new user interface is geared towards sales reps with an intuitive interface that allows sales reps to work more efficiently.

The dashboard and charts in Lightning Experience behave much like Wave where changes in the chart recalculates in real time. While the new interface is easy to enable, It may not be suited for everyone as there are some missing functionalities at this point of time. In the future releases salesforce would eliminate those gaps, but keep safe harbor statement in mind.

The Initial release with Winter-16, is mainly focused for Sales Reps and with some extra features based on Opportunity like Opportunity Board. With Spring-16 [Safe harbor] we could get some exciting feature for Case Objects [Service Related] and Opportunity Board will be called “Opportunity Kanban”. For More Information refer to “salesforce_spring16_release_notes”.

For Enabling Lightning Experience, go to your developer edition and Setup, In the Top Left side menu, there will be an option called “Lightning Experience”. You will need to activate some settings/features as per the Pre-Requisite.

For using the Lightning Experience you could access by following - The Pre-Requisite and followed by enabling  Lightning Experience using the newly provided Cool Spinner/Switcher action.

After enabling it, you will get a cool switcher by which you can switch anytime between the Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience.

Switcher from Salesforce Classic

Warning Message for Switching to Lighting Experience

 Switcher from Lightning Experience

Warning Message for Switching to Salesforce Classic

If you need to use Lightning Apps or Lightning Component or Lightning Component Tabs then you will have to register a domain in salesforce from My Domain in Domain Management option from setup. I will try to cover those tipic in more detail in my next post or you could also contact me for guidance on this or if you would like to try your hands on trailhead. The trailhead link is mentioned below.

Getting Started with Salesforce and Lightning

Note: We could not use one/one.app for using salesforce1 because it will display the Lightning Experience Interface only if the Lightning Experience is enabled for the user/org from Winter-16 otherwise it will display the Run-Time Exception.

In short, Salesforce Classic the Standard User Interface which we are using from long time and Lightning Experience is the new User Interface which have the same Styling and Experience which we have for mobiles with extended functionality to improve performance and usability.

Lighting Component: We could take a simple example like we could build a Visualforce component in standard way and display on multiple pages. We could build Lightning Component and we could use them as in Standalone Lightning App, Lighting Component Tab which we could use in SalesForce1 Navigations and as a tab in Lightning Experience in some Custom Application or in Salesforce1 and Objects Actions etc… For more information you could refer the following modules in salesforce trailhead:

Lightning Component

Lighting Connect: We could use this to connect salesforce with any external application by using external object and releationship. For more information you could refer the following modules in salesforce trailhead:

Lightning Connect

Lightning Design System: This is a collection of CSS framework, Icons, Fonts, and Design Tokens, which could be used in Visualforce Page development to match the UI with the Lighting Experience while developing a visualforce page for an application.

Lightning Design System

I will try to plan my next post about the Lightning Component, Lightning Connect and Lightning Design System in more detail, stay in touch to help each other.

I really like all the Lightning Features which we have got with the Winter-16 release and will get more in future. Keep sharing the knowledge and keep loving salesforce as I do. Feel free to contact me anytime if you have anything in which I could help you.

Thanks,

Amit Goyal

Email: amitgoyal09@gmail.com

Skype: amitgoyal09