Salesforce Lightning Web Components Framework Now Open Source

Salesforce, the CRM giant, is expanding the use of its Lightning Web Components JavaScript platform among developers and the IT community by releasing its code to the open source community on GitHub.

The availability of the Lightning Web Components platform as open-source code was announced at the Salesforce TrailheaDX developers conference in San Francisco, giving developers another standards-based framework to build their apps for any platform using tools of their choice and open coding languages.

When Salesforce’s Lightning framework model was created three years ago, the inspiration was to build tools for developers that offer standardization to gain users and further development, Ryan Schellack,  product marketing manager for the Salesforce platform, told Channel Futures.

Salesforce’s Ryan Shellack

“We felt it was a tremendous opportunity for people who build applications on Salesforce to deploy and build their applications,” he said. “It always was the intention that if they wanted to make it important , it had to have its own open-source community. We knew we would make it open later.”

A large number of systems integrators have been asking for the code to be released as open source so they could take it and expand it, he said.

“Using open-source software, it can give partners more control and features that were not possible just a few months before,” said Schellack.

For channel partners and ISVs, the Lightning platform includes a compatibility mode which makes it consistent with a wide number of web browsers.

“And because it uses a very light framework, you are closer to the bare metal of the browsers and there are fewer JavaScript components you have to deal with to get your functionality,” he said. “There’s less in the way between you and the web app experience.”

With the release as an open source project on GitHub, the development community will now work with the project and co-own its road map for future development.

“We fully expect to accept the bulk of the pull requests (features) that come in to be from the developer community,” said Schellack. “We’re agnostic to where those developers are coming from, whether they are individuals or from companies. This is part of a broader trend at Salesforce toward open source.”

By opening Lightning Web Components in its own open-source community, developer teams can now recruit from larger talent pools to code and rapidly expand and build their apps using input from many more developers. At the same time, channel partners and businesses can adopt and use those apps for customers and employees while taking advantage of trust, scale and performance.

Diego Garcia, senior engineering manager for Vlocity, a Salesforce ISV partner, told Channel Futures that by turning the Lightning Web Components into an open-source project, Salesforce is working effectively to …