What is the Lightning Component Framework?

The Lightning Component framework is a UI framework for developing dynamic web apps for mobile and desktop devices. It’s a modern framework for building single-page applications engineered for growth.

The framework supports partitioned multi-tier component development that bridges the client and server. It uses JavaScript on the client side and Apex on the server side.

Lightning Component Framework and Aura Framework

The Lightning Component framework is built on the open-source Aura framework available at http://github.com/forcedotcom/aura. You can build general-purpose web apps hosted on your own server using the Aura framework, which also provides features and components that may not be available in the Lightning Component framework. Many of the sample code here uses out-of-the-box components from the Aura framework, such as aura:iteration and ui:button. The aura namespace contains components to simplify your app logic, and the ui namespace contains components for user interface elements like buttons and input fields. The force namespace contains components specific to Salesforce.

Visualforce and Lightning

The Lightning Component framework is a component-based framework. As building blocks of an app, components encapsulate HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, while interacting via events. Lightning components are client-side centric, making them more dynamic and mobile friendly. Contrastingly, Visualforce components are page-centric and rely heavily on server calls. Visualforce facilitates delivering of template-driven web pages and email messages, making it suitable for developers who wish to maintain greater control over the lifecycle of the request. Because Lightning components use Apex on the server side, organizations that can’t use Apex code can’t create Lightning components, but they can use Visualforce.