Salesforce has emerged from being a CRM to a powerful cloud-based platform which is sufficient for running all the aspects of a business end to end.  Lightning Aura has been such a great technology from the very beginning of its journey. It has evolved to match new edge platforms and requirements of the enterprises.

At the beginning of the Salesforce Development times, developers used Visual Force, which is an HTML Tag-based mark-up language to develop their Visual Force web pages and Apex to control the internal logic.

But this HTML based Visual Force standards were not compatible to build large scale enterprise solutions and complex applications. So, developers needed something that could support the ongoing huge demand for web-based applications with complicated business logic.

In 2014, Salesforce launched the Lightning Component Framework and it changed the Salesforce Programming way forever. Lightning Component Framework brought Aura Framework which used a component-driven model that was brilliant in developing large-scale enterprise applications.

Since the time the web technology is being changed every day, seeing an unprecedented change in JavaScript Frameworks, redefined way of creation of a web page, and more. Lightning Component also has to become Lightning web components to accommodate the newest technologies in Salesforce development.

In this article, we’ll see the difference between the Aura Framework and Lightning Web Components and the benefits of one over another. Read on.

What is Lightning Component? – The Era of Lightning Aura

To understand the Salesforce Lightning component, we need to know about Salesforce Lightning first. Salesforce Lightning is a complete toolbox set for developers which include Salesforce Lightning Framework and some tools like Lightning App Builder, Experience Builder to make the development seamless for the developers.

Salesforce Lightning Component is a user interface (UI) based framework for developing single-page mobile/desktop/web-based applications. Using the Lightning Component along with these tools, you can customize and deploy new apps in mobile devices easily and effortlessly.

Aura components are reusable units of the app. It represents a small section of the UI of reusable apps. Aura Component Framework contains several such pre-built components. We can consider an example of Lightning Components. Lightning components come with Lightning Design styling and are fully configurable to create custom Lightning components for the apps according to the requirements. Developers render these components to produce HTML Document Object Model elements within the browser.

Everything that happens inside a component is encapsulated and hence the developer can just concentrate on building their apps. Innovations, design changes, or any new change done to the components are done by the author of the component itself.

Major Benefits of using Lightning Components are –

• Lightning Component Framework is not backed by the legacy Visual Force Framework. It helps the developers to create apps using a standardized JavaScript framework.
• Components are simple to use, reusable, and customizable, which offers a robust and fast framework to work with.
• The lightning framework is very much event-driven, which helps to deliver faster apps to the end-users.
• Lightning Component pages are higher in performance than their legacy counterparts.
• Easy to create a responsive page or app with Lightning Component.

The Evolution of Lightning Web Components (LWC)

The best possible solution is thought of when a development framework like Lightning Framework is designed. But with time, every best solution gets a room for improvement. Lightning Web Components is the new way to create Lightning Component simply.

In 2014, since the Aura was introduced, the internet has changed drastically. Google started to scrap the decades-old limitations and replacing them with a faster and better way of working with the internet. This new concept was known as the Web Component.

After Google has released Web Components to the Google Chrome browser, all the major web browsers like Firefox, Safari, or Edge started to adopt it faster. Salesforce Development had to keep up the pace and standardization’s of the Web Components according to the huge demand of the web Components across the internet.

Salesforce moved from Lightning Component to Lightning Web Components framework keeping all the good aspects of the famous Aura Framework. Also, the users of the Aura framework started working with Lightning Web Component easily as these two frameworks are identical.

Lightning Web Components leverage the Web Components technology and DOM rendering to deliver unparalleled user experience through the pages.

Differences between Aura and Lightning Web Components

LWC was created basically to overcome the shortcomings of the Aura framework but not eliminating the power of the Lightning Components.

With the web standards, developers had to use many different things like a rendering engine, standard elements, core language, and events to build a complete large-scale web application.

Following were some other shortcomings with traditional Aura –

• Continuous UI transformations needed optimized rendering which was not the case with Lightning Components
• Standard UI elements could not be altered to create customized components which were the biggest shortcoming. The modern enterprises needed customized user experiences.
• The client-side technology like modules, classes, decorations, or promises – could not be written to create modern and large-scale organizations.

Moreover, Angular, React – these are all JavaScript frameworks but provide the finest level abstraction. Due to that, they seem to be different languages. Due to this skill were not transferable. Apps or Components within different frameworks were very tough to interoperate.

To overcome all these development issues, Web Stack is released in 2019. In this web stack, many web features that required a framework to develop an application now came as standard. Developers no longer needed proprietary language extensions, proprietary component models, proprietary modules.

Salesforce launched Lightning Web Components. It was built to offer a platform to the developers to create large scale enterprise apps based on modern web components. It leverages all-powerful new techniques like custom elements, templates, shadow DOM, decorators, modules, and more.

On the top of the core Web Stack, Lightning Web Components provides a layer of customized Salesforce Services like –

• The legacy of Base Lightning Components, which offers a set of 70+ U components that are built as custom elements.
• Base Lightning Components that include the User Interface API as the underlying service and Lightning Service Metadata. These two combine to offer a sharp productivity inclination.
• The most important data caching, Salesforce Data, and Metadata and data synchronization can be achieved through Lightning Data Service.

So basically, now the Aura Programming model and LWC can co-exist. Lightning components have now two different ways to create – Aura Component and Lightning Web Components.

Benefits of Lightning Web Components over Aura Programming

Lightning Developers have combined the Web Components programming with the Salesforce metadata and services. It allowed them to leverage unprecedented productivity.

Here are some benefits of using Lightning Web Components over the Aura Components, though they can co-exist to offer a better programming practice –

• Performance Hike – Since LWC is built on the top of the Web Component model and no added abstraction is used, the performance of the pages and apps are increased hugely.

• Learning is easy – Lightning Web Component developers need to learn only one skill, that it the Lightning Web Component framer only. They do not need to learn any other framework or Java Script separately like they had to do in the Aura programming model.

• Decreased Proprietary and Increased Standards – As we previously mentioned, the LWC framework uses more standards than the proprietary components. So, there is more customization with LWC than that of Aura Components.

• Use of Reusable Service Components – LWC Components are customizable, reusable, and scalable that may or may not have UI. These service Components can be used anywhere in the application. It helps the code to be optimized and clean.

• Enhanced Security and Browser Compatibility – LWC has built-in security features. Also, it has limited event scope and more CSS, Script, and DOM isolation that offers better security and browser compatibility of the apps.

Conclusion

Want to migrate your business from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning? You can directly opt for Lightning Web Components for better-performing apps. Also, if your organization owns existing apps that are developed using with Aura components and if you want to upgrade to LWC, you can do that too. What you need to do is, to find Expert Lightning Web Component Developers to help you in the migration process from Aura Components to the Lightning Web Components.  

At AnavClouds Software, we provide effective Lightning Web Components Development solutions to boast your business productivity. We are a team of highly experienced individuals who work dedicate to provide custom solutions for every business model. To know more, visit https://www.anavcloudsoftwares.com