Lightning Components and Applications Previewer Enhancements

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Salesforce Lightning Components are already onstage for a while, and each and every day more and more applications and organizations are moving to Lightning Experience. Thus, Lightning development is gaining much more weight compared to the good old Visualforce. That is why, as a part of our big Spring update, we are going to bring in some new interesting features, which will make Lightning development somehow easier, or at least, faster.

Combined Tabs for a Bundle Editor

While Application and Component Bundles are defined in several separate files, it is clear that very often you will need to quickly switch between different bundle items - to make some changes, or just to check how things are done there. So in The Welkin Suite, we will apply the well-established approach with the combined editor for the bundle. In the main tabs menu, you will see the bundle itself, while in the bundle you will be able to switch between different components. Of course, in this case hotkeys should be supported, as regular CTRL+Tab won't work anymore for switching between bundle items.

Enhanced previewer for Lightning Components and Applications

While backend (read "Apex") developers can live in the IDE looking at Salesforce UI as often as never, frontend development requires at least a possibility to examine what your component or application looks like, and how it behaves. A built-in previewer for Lightning Applications in The Welkin Suite has been around for a while, and yet, we would like to make it much better.

First of all, we will give you an option to pass URL GET parameters to the Lightning Application preview, so you will be able to test different scenarios.

But the main improvement will be related to the Lightning Components preview - you will have an option to specify which Lightning Application should be used for previewing the component. Once you do this each time you will build your changes for the component - the preview pane will reload the specified application (of course with all the URL parameters), so you'll be able to see if everything is working properly. Another option that we are considering right now is an option to specify ANY URL as a preview link for the component - which can be very handy in cases when your component is embedded into a detail view, for example. What do you think - should we limit the preview option to only applications, or allow entering any URL?

We will also update our web browser engine to the latest version of Chromium. However, we will add an option to open the preview page in the browser (would you like to be able to configure multiple browsers, so you can open in any of them?).

So that is our current vision of the way Lightning experience should work in The Welkin Suite, and we are already in progress of bringing the changes to life. And as much as we are excited to see all of these features up and running in the updated version of our IDE, we would also love to know what you think about it. Maybe your vision can help us make our approach even better - so don't hesitate to share it with us!