<aside> 💡 Important: Here, only the most interesting parts to me are reproduced, but the complete reference and authoring is to Bogdan and Pierre.

Lightning Experience with Lightning Speed (Are We There Yet?)

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Contents

What happens when you hit a URL on Salesforce?

So what happens after a user types a URL into the browser navigation bar and presses “Enter”? Let’s take a look.

While breaking apart the overall flow, it’s important to note that Lightning Experience is an SPA (single-page web application). It uses client-side rendering of Aura and LWC components, as opposed to Salesforce Classic, which uses server-side rendering and Visualforce components.

Keeping that in mind, here’s what the client browser does when a user initiates navigation:

And here are some more details on the steps required to produce Lightning Experience page as presented in the diagram above:

1. Establish initial connection to a Salesforce data center
2. Download initial HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with the core framework and the most common Aura and LWC components
3. Use client-side rendering to build the application chrome (initial layout) and remove the loading screen
4. Download additional code and components specific to the page
5. Request data to display in the components while enforcing access and security
6. Start progressively rendering the app page as more data arrives, and wait for further user input

After the initial navigation, one of the following is most likely to happen.

As noted in the diagram above, the user can likely do one of the following:

• Perform an action that requires full navigation (repeating steps 2 to 6 above), e.g., switch applications in the App Launcher