Book Image

Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture - Third Edition

By : Andrew Fawcett
Book Image

Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture - Third Edition

By: Andrew Fawcett

Overview of this book

Salesforce Lightning provides a secure and scalable platform to build, deploy, customize, and upgrade applications. This book will take you through the architecture of building an application on the Lightning platform to help you understand its features and best practices, and ensure that your app keeps up with your customers’ increasing needs as well as the innovations on the platform. This book guides you in working with the popular aPaaS offering from Salesforce, the Lightning Platform. You’ll see how to build and ship enterprise-grade apps that not only leverage the platform's many productivity features, but also prepare your app to harness its extensibility and customization capabilities. You'll even get to grips with advanced application architectural design patterns such as Separation of Concerns, Unit Testing and Dependency Integration. You will learn to use Apex and JavaScript with Lightning Web Components, Platform Events, among others, with the help of a sample app illustrating patterns that will ensure your own applications endure and evolve with the platform. Finally, you will become familiar with using Salesforce DX to develop, publish, and monitor a sample app and experience standard application life cycle processes along with tools such as Jenkins to implement CI/CD. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to develop effective business apps and be ready to explore innovative ways to meet customer demands.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Lightning architecture

In this section, we will discuss key layers of the Lightning architecture, which will allow you to have a better framework of understanding as we go deeper.

A key aspect that took me by surprise at first is the need to write client-side controllers in JavaScript. This can be particularly puzzling at first if you are a Visualforce developer, but it is a vital part of being a Lightning developer and is a reflection of its client-side architecture. As we saw in the previous chapter, Apex server-side controllers still play a part, but are mainly used for accessing your backend Apex Services and Selectors.

In general, Lightning development is much more componentized. In terms of how the UI is designed and how the code is factored, the two are much more aligned, making it easier to maintain and navigate code. This also gives a much greater emphasis on the separation...