Custom User Interface

At the front of any great business application is a great user interface that's easy to use, powerful, and suited exactly for the tasks, users, and devices the application serves. Visualforce is a complete framework for creating such user interfaces, enabling any kind of interface design and interaction to be built and delivered entirely in the cloud. The user interfaces you build with Visualforce can extend the standard Force.com platform look and feel, or replace it with a completely unique style and set of sophisticated interactions. Because Visualforce markup is ultimately rendered into HTML, designers can use Visualforce tags alongside standard HTML, JavaScript, Flash, or any other code that can execute within an HTML page on the platform. And that's only the beginning: you can also use Visualforce pages to combine data from multiple Force.com platform objects, or blend data from Web services into your applications, as we discuss in Moving Beyond Point-and-Click App Development.

In Winter '16, Salesforce unveiled Lightning Experience, a new user interface that makes the Force.com platform faster and easier to use than ever before. In Lightning Experience, you can use the Lightning Component framework to create dynamic, single-page web apps across platforms. The Lightning Component framework includes ready-to-use components—like the App Launcher component and the Recent Items component—that you can combine with components you develop yourself as you build your app.

Because Lightning Experience is still being continuously developed and improved, this book references Salesforce Classic. To learn more about Lightning Experience, try the Get Started with Lightning Experience trail at https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trail/lex_admin_implementation.