Lightning App Builder is an integrated development environment for people who don't write code. Instead, the idea is to present a user with data and prebuilt off-the-shelf components that play well together. If you'd like to give it a spin, you can access the Lightning App Builder in any Summer '15 or newer org by clicking on Lightning App Builder under the Create submenu in Setup. The first step in creating a new Lightning App is to choose the template. Note the new column layouts, 2 and 3, that are available here:
Having selected a template, developers are taken to the App Builder Canvas, which looks like this:
The palette to the left shows a list of components available to the developer. Split into three segments, the first shows all of the built-in components, such as Filter List, recently used items, and Visualforce. After this, there are two groups of components. The first section display custom developed components and components available via AppExchange Packages. Beware, however, that your component must have the implements="flexipage:availableForAllPageTypes" component attribute in order to be used in the App Builder. Additionally, only components that have design files will show up in App Builder. Code developers can create custom components, package them, and distribute them through the AppExchange. Developers using the Lightning App Builder who have installed that app exchange package would see those components in the final section.
The center section displays the application's UI as you create it. Simply drag and drop options from the left palette to the drop points labeled Add Component(s) Here. This is the prime example of the shift away from traditional app development to lightning. It's easy and incredibly fast to drag and drop a few components onto an app canvas; much faster than writing Visualforce pages, controllers, and tests. By relying on prebuilt components that play nicely with each other, development of business process apps has never been faster.
Finally, the palette to the right holds the details of the currently selected object. If we were to drag a filtered list to the top most component's drop point and highlight it, the right palette would display the details of our filtered list component:
These properties are the attributes of the component exposed through the design file, which we discussed earlier. The SVG file of the component is used as the icon in the left palette.
In our previous screenshots, we previewed with a phone-sized screen, but by selecting a tablet or desktop view from the drop-down menu at the top of the center pane, you can preview other sizes as well. Here's what our app would look like if you added a report chart and viewed it as a tablet app:
The double-edged sword of Lightning App Builder is that your functionality is largely confined to the components that are available. While it's true, that you can include Visualforce pages; they have to be self-contained to be functional. For instance, including a Visualforce page that requires a URL parameter of Id to be populated results in this error when you add it as a component:
Of course, as coding developers, we can easily write custom components to add functionality and features to our Lightning apps. I imagine there will be a healthy set of AppExchange components available sooner rather than later. In the meantime, Lightning App Builder is a fantastic replacement for current dashboards! Offering different and expanded layouts with the ability to include charts from reports as well as related lists built by custom filters, there's quite a few compelling reasons to build dashboards in the Lightning app builder, with just the built-in components!
This chapter serves as an overview of the various concepts and features of Lightning. Lightning, however, is an evolving product with new and refined features in every release. Because of this, I encourage you to read through the lightning section of each set of release notes that Salesforce puts out. While features such as the Lightning Process builder are unlikely to disappear, they may very well change. For instance, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point, Process builder became bulk enabled. Likewise, I expect the Lightning app builder to have an ever increasing set of components available to developers. Lightning Connect may one day be able to write data back to the external data source. Time will tell, but even with these features and tools where they are today, they represent a powerful shift in what it means to develop business applications. Instead of writing countless triggers, coding developers are empowered to develop cutting edge components and actions for non-coding developers to rapidly drag and drop into place for graphically stunning apps that can easily adapt to changing business rules.