25. Building Enterprise-Level Applications with Web Components

Heroku Front-end Engineer Jamie White sits down with René Winkelmeyer, a developer evangelist at Salesforce, to talk about the company's commitment to advancing web components. Web components are a collection of standardized web and browser APIs designed to overcome some of the limitations with the design of the Internet, particularly when it comes to page rendering. Web components exist outside of web frameworks such as React, Ember, or Vue in that they are built using standard web technologies and can be used in any application, regardless of the framework or language it's architected in. They're built for reusability and consistency across your application's UI.

Lightning Web Components is a toolkit built and open sourced by Salesforce to ease the development of web components. These components are Enterprise-level, in that they provide functionality for many complicated UI scenarios. Although there are other web component frameworks, such as LitElement, a core goal of LWC is to make the process of building web components more declarative.

The conversation turns towards attracted Salesforce to investing time in web components, with the conclusion being that open standards would continue to succeed in the future when compared against closed and proprietary tools. Their focus is also on ensuring that accessibility needs are met for every user of a website.

Links from this episode

• The Lighting Web Components site has more information on LWCs, including documentation and a demo application.
• The LWC GitHub repo is where all of the community conversations occur.
• LitElement is one alternative web component framework
• You can follow René on Twitter @muenzpraeger

Episode source