Lightning

Once again regretfully it’s time to start talking about Winter; the Winter ’17 (v38.0) release that is. This (pre-Dreamforce ’16) release sees the return of a snowman logo (last seen in Winter ’10) – albeit rather glum looking on this occasion – despite the animated wink ;-); perhaps Dreamforce ’16 will cheer him/her up.

The new release is generally available now for pre-release preview. The preview release notes are available here.

The Winter ’17 sandbox preview starts early September 9th, with production orgs being upgraded late September/early October. Full details of the release schedule can be found on the trust.salesforce.com site.

This post briefly outlines selected highlights related to the Force.com platform (in no order of significance).

– features are GA if not indicated otherwise

App Launcher
Winter ’17 re-introduces Application as a primary navigation concept; with previous LEX versions Applications are essentially logical groupings of functions within the App Switcher but had no further relevance – Navigation Menus are defined at the Profile Level not per-Application. With Winter ’17 Custom Applications are defined as Lightning Applications, tabs are added as-per Salesforce Classic – so really the only difference is the position of the App Launcher (far-left of the tab bar) and its ability to open a tab directly. The new App Launcher can also be set as the default page.

AccountContactRelation Person Account Compatibility
The Summer ’16 release introduced a standard object version of the junction object typically implemented between Account and Contact to support indirect relationships (where more detail is required than ContactRoles allows). Winter ’17 provides Person Account compatibility and also support for Apex Triggers and Validation Rules. This is great functionality; Person Accounts (in a primarily B2C context perhaps) can now reflect any Business Account relationships and vice-versa using standard features.

Lightning Component Actions
Lightning Components that implement the new force:LightningQuickAction or
force:LightningQuickActionWithoutHeader interfaces can be invoked from a Custom Action added to a Page Layout.

Spanning Relationships Limit Increase
The Spanning Relationships limit applies to declarative features such as formulas, workflow rules and validation rules and constrains the number of unique object references. Previously this limit was 10 but could be lifted to 15 via Salesforce Support. Hopefully the new value of 15 can also be increased as this particular limit can be serious scalability constraint particularly where the org customisation has made no effort in respect to conservation.

Invoke a Process from a Process
Invocable Processes allow one Process to call another Process; this allows a modular design approach to be taken to support reuse of processes as units of logical encapsulation.

Flows for Lightning Experience (Beta)
With this beta feature enabled URL-based flows can execute with the Lightning runtime rather than the Salesforce Classic runtime. It’s great to see Force.com Flow (or Visual Workflow) entering the Lightning era – automated conversion of existing Flows to Lightning Experience is a real benefit for implementations that have taken advantage of this incredibly powerful and much overlooked capability. Winter ’17 also provides the ability to embed flows within Lighting Pages (App, Record and Home pages).

Use SLDS in Lightning Apps
Lightning App definitions can now automatically reference the latest Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) styles and design tokens. This is achieved by defining the application as extends=”force:slds”. This approach is recommended over the Static Resource approach where a particular version of the SLDS is statically referenced.

Automated Package Installation via API
ISVs are now able to automate managed package push upgrades via the API. This capability provides support for use cases such as customers accepting an upgrade offer sent via email or submitting a web form to request an upgrade. The Tooling API now supports automated upload of packages, upload status monitoring and the retrieval of installation Urls for distribution to subscribers – via the PackageUploadRequest object (and related).

Omni-Channel Routing for Chats (Beta)
A new Routing Type “Omni” enables Omni-Channel to route and prioritise Live Agent chats alongside other types of Work Item. Previously Live Agent chats were routed using skills and Agent availability only. As with Omni-Channel generally, this feature is Salesforce Classic only at this time.

Lightning Login
Passwords can be frustrating for users and a system administration nightmare. With Lightning Login user authentication can be achieved through a simple mobile-based approval. The user enters their username and clicks the Lightning Bolt, a notification is sent to the Salesforce Authenticator app (iOS and Android), user completes authentication in the app via Fingerprint or PIN. The feature works in both LEX and Salesforce Classic and is assigned to users via Permission Set.

Thankfully it’s time to start thinking Summer; the Summer ’16 (v37.0) release that is. Sporting a cheery (but perhaps more Autumnal than Summer) fireworks logo, the new release is available now for partner preview. The release notes are generally available here.

The Summer ’16 sandbox preview starts early May (7th/8th), with production orgs being upgraded early June. Full details of the release schedule are listed in this official blog post.

As expected Summer ’16 is an evolutionary release not revolutionary and continues the trend of Lighting Experience consolidation. As well as closing the gap on Classic functionality, a number of interesting net-new LEX features have been added.

This post briefly outlines selected highlights related to the Force.com platform (in no order of significance).

– features are GA if not indicated otherwise

Sandbox-to-Sandbox Cloning
Recent releases have provided some interesting enhancements in the sandbox area (post refresh scripts, increased edition allowances etc.), Summer ’16 build on such improvements with a new function that allows a sandbox to be created as a clone of another sandbox (as opposed to a production org). Superficially this sounds like a useful capability; on further thought however this could have a significant impact on development process, allowing QA sandboxes to be cloned as copies of development at the end of sprint (as just one example). Any uni-lateral sandbox-to-sandbox deployments could theoretically be replaced with a clone. Multiple development sandboxes converging into a single upstream org would be the exception. Cloning is also supported by the Tooling API, enabling full automation of environment management. I’ve been unable test this feature as sandbox copy doesn’t appear to be enabled in pre-release orgs, however it would appear that data can be included in the clone. How data copy works between the different sandbox types is yet to be seen.

Force.com Flow REST API (Pilot)
New resources have been added to describe Flows and to manipulate Flow Interviews. The intent of this will be to enable the development of fully customised user experiences for Flow. Whilst possible to some degree via CSS, the user interface for Flow is difficult to customise in respect to branding, fine-grained control over layout, responsive behaviour etc.. The new API resources allow development of a Flow user interface in any technology that can manipulate a REST API.

Custom Metadata Types – Relationship Fields (Pilot)
CMT now support relationship fields that reference other CMT, custom objects or one of the core CRM standard objects (Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, Case). Previously pseudo-relationship fields were required of the text type that held the Name or id of the parent record; the new functionality is clearly a big improvement on this.

Apex – Populated SObject Field Map
As a programming convenience it is now possible to get a map of the fields populated in memory for an SObject instance. Previously, trial-and-error coding approaches have been required to identify whether particular fields are populated; this is prevalent in dynamic code and prone to error. Useful simplifications to the Apex language are always good news.

Lightning Components LockerService
LockerService introduces a new security architecture for Lightning Components comprised of technologies and techniques. Summer ’16 introduces LockerService in the form of two critical updates for existing orgs; one for internal components, the other for communities. New orgs will be auto-enabled by default; Winter ’17 will see all orgs auto-enabled. In short LockerService provides component namespace isolation in respect to DOM access and JS visibility, additionally only public documented Lightning JS APIs can be accessed. There’s considerably more to LockerService than this description covers, the link below provides more detail.

https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/developer-relations/2016/04/introducing-lockerservice-lightning-components.html

Shield Platform Encryption
Shield Platform Encryption now supports Custom Date Fields and compatible fields within Managed Packages. The breadth of platform features that work with the shield data encryption-at-rest technology has also been extended; the new vertical clouds, Organisation Sync and Salesforce-to-Salesforce being interesting examples.

Create a Calendar from Standard/Custom Object Data
Personal Calendar views can now be created directly from data held in Standard or Custom objects. The calendar configuration requires that fields are specified for event start and end dates and also the name. There are currently limits to the number of events that can be viewed and also no means to share or subscribe to a calendar view of this type. Hopefully the next release will support public calendars of this type; the requirement for this style of data presentation is very common.

Process Builder – Execute Multiple Action Groups
Summer ’16 sees further investment in Process Builder which is great news for implementation practitioners using the process automation capabilities of the platform. Previously a process execution (or Flow interview behind the scenes) applied the logic of a single action groups and stopped. With Summer ’16 action groups can be configured with finish behaviour that continues to to evaluate the next action group in sequence. As such multiple logical conditions can be evaluated and acted upon within a single process execution. This new extension will help reduce the number of processes necessary to deliver even simple business process automations and as such is great maintainability improvement.

User Switcher
Regardless of role, most Salesforce users require access to multiple orgs at some stage; Summer ’16 introduces the convenience of a user switcher located on the drop-down menu accessed from the profile picture in Lightning Experience. Adding a user name provides one-click access from this menu to the org. Streamlined cross-org navigation has been long outstanding; beyond the obvious sandbox access use cases, in my experience the level of multiple-org access continues to increase over time.

Associate Contacts to Multiple Accounts
The Contact to Account relationship is now extended to support one direct relationship plus multiple indirect relationships. A new junction object [AccountContactRelation] provides a standard Roles picklist, plus the ability to add Custom Fields. The inability to customise Contact Roles historically has resulted in the prevalence of custom approaches to Account to Contact relationship modelling. Note, it doesn’t appear possible to add process automation to the new object.

Enhanced Email
Emails sent from the Lightning Email Composer are now recorded as strongly-defined Email records rather than Tasks. A new Email standard object has been added which supports workflow, custom fields, layouts, triggers etc. Email records can be associated with multiple contacts, leads and person accounts and a single account, opportunity etc. Enhanced Email will be enabled by default where Email to Case is not in use. Representing emails as Tasks has never made complete sense; with Enhanced Email, Email records can be used as the basis for business process. Note, workflow on the Email object is limited to updating Case fields, this will limit the applicable use cases for this new functionality.

There’s no better way to kick-start the New Year than to indulge in a bit of release-note exploration for the upcoming Spring release. This exercise is best performed with the latest release notes to hand, a brand new pre-release org to play with and the previous release certification exams safely completed. The links below are provided for convenience.

Spring ’16 Pre-release Sign-up
Spring ’16 Release Notes

The rollout dates for the primary production instances are the 6th (2nd release weekend), 12th and 13th February (final release weekend); specific instance dates are stated on the trust.salesforce.com site.

As expected the Spring ’16 release is focused on consolidation and enhancement of Lightning Experience; this feature set feels substantially more enterprise-ready as the intermittent performance and stability issues observed previously appear to be addressed and the feature gap from Salesforce Classic has been diminished in key areas such as reporting. A robust Lightning Experience that can be released to business users with confidence can’t come soon enough for many, although with features gaps remaining and Person Account compatibility at Beta status the Summer release may present a more realistic timeline.

This post briefly outlines selected highlights related to the Force.com platform (in no order of significance).

– features are GA if not indicated otherwise

Developer Sandbox Limits Increase
All editions that include sandbox licenses have significantly increased limits. Enterprise Edition customers now get access to 25 developer sandboxes instead of 1. I had to read this a few times to take the news in. The single sandbox constraint for EE customers has been a challenge for many implementations trying to adopt development lifecycle best-practices or to simply isolate testing from development or UAT or indeed develop multiple projects in parallel. The new limit will provide a significant level of flexibility here and promote a standard-based approach, I hope.

Post Sandbox Copy Script
A new Apex interface (SandboxPostCopy) enables Apex script to be executed automatically post Sandbox copy operation (create or refresh). In a similar fashion to the PostInstallScript interface used by ISV to apply configuration steps and data creation tasks following package installation the new interface should help prepare a sandbox using a standardised, validated and automated approach.

Lightning Experience – Person Account Compatibility (Beta)
Person Account compatibility is highly anticipated by all B2C implementations unable to consider Lighting Experience otherwise. With the Spring ’16 release a beta status compatibility is provided which at least provides an ability to test and explore Lightning Experience in a sandbox setting.

Lightning Experience – UI Enhancements
List View filters can now be edited on-the-fly and record detail pages support inline editing. Both features providing enhancement to the general user experience. The ability to view embedded charts and to manipulate filters on the List View page is a real improvement in this area. Inline editing simply reinstates a capability taken for granted by most. It is also possible to define custom navigation menus and assign by User Profile to deliver a customised view to different users.

Lightning Experience – Reporting
The reporting feature gap between Lighting Experience and Salesforce Classic prior to Spring ’16 made for difficult reading. The new release establishes some degree of feature parity with Dashboard Filters, Dynamic Dashboards, Dashboard table components and the ability to view record details on Matrix Reports all making a welcome return.

Lightning Experience – Detect User Experience
Last point in relation to Lightning Experience; support is now provided for Apex script to reliably detect the current user experience, i.e. Salesforce1, Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic. New Apex methods are available (User.UITheme and UserInfo.getUiTheme()) that provide a standardised approach that replaces the previous use of the sforce.one JavaScript global (and its unsupported approach caveat).

Files Connect for Box (Pilot)
Files held on the Box cloud are now accessible directly in Salesforce via the Files Connect feature. Given how commonplace it is that Salesforce and Box are used in concert a standardised approach is highly convenient particularly where support extends to on-premise data sources (Sharepoint etc.).

Custom Metadata Types
Custom Metadata Types have been enhanced to support bulk creation scenarios and the upsert operation. Picklist fields are also supported, although this a beta status feature for Spring ’16. CMT provide the basis for a variety of platform-on-a-platform use cases or simply convenient application configuration management. Continued investment in this area is great news for the developer community.

Apex Test Suites
As a long-time advocate of a structured approach to Apex Unit Test classes the new Test Suite features is an excellent introduction. In short Test Classes can be arbitrarily grouped in the context of a parent Test Suite label, the suite itself can then be selected at the time of test execution from the New Suite run option. Test Suite definition and invocation takes place in the Developer Console.

Apex Unit Tests
New developers writing Apex Unit tests have suffered for years with the platform constraint that setup and non-setup objects can’t be created in the same Apex transaction (Mixed DML Operation Error). Typically this is problematic where User records are created in the test context alongside test records such as Accounts etc. With Spring ’16 it is now possible to create the setup object via @future method. A second improvement in context is the ability to change record creation date field values using the System.Test.setCreatedDate method. Where record processing logic is temporal in nature this ability will be helpful in writing tests that correctly validate the code logic.

Lightning Out (Beta)
Lightning Out provides the capability to securely embed Lighting Components into a remote application running on any external platform or container. This YouTube link provides a great introduction to the power and potential of Lightning Out.

Platform Security Health Check
Spring ’16 provides an interesting new security Health Check feature that enables the current org configuration to be compared against a Salesforce recommended baseline. Any feature that highlights security risk or vulnerability is positive addition and should help mitigate against complacency.

With September upon us and Dreamforce 2015 on the near horizon it’s time to dispel thoughts of sunshine and holidays and get focused on the upcoming Winter release. Whilst it’s undoubtedly depressing to be reading the word Winter in early September, there’s plenty in the new release to raise the spirits. It’s also clear that with significant platform changes emerging, i.e. Lighting Experience, this is an important time to be on the front-foot in terms of keeping personal platform expertise up-to-date. For Salesforce professionals or engaged users, the Winter ’16 release presents a great opportunity to reset your knowledge of the platform.

Pre-release sign-up appears to be offline at present, however existing pre-release orgs should be updated and available to explore. A preview set of release notes can be downloaded from here. The rollout window for production instances is between the 25th September and the 17th October, specific instance dates are stated on the trust.salesforce.com site.

This post briefly outlines selected highlights related to the Force.com platform (in no order of significance).

– features are GA if not indicated otherwise

Lightning Experience
As the marketing literature states; a new, modern, intelligent user experience – or, in other words the new Salesforce.

With Winter ’16 we’re entering a new transitional era for the platform with features migrating from the Salesforce Classic UI (Aloha) across to Salesforce Lightning Experience presumably over the course of a series of releases. This journey starts with a focused Sales Cloud offering. The updated user interface looks like a significant advancement, however many users will need to navigate both interfaces which may degrade the overall user experience. It should be noted that access to the Lighting Experience desktop experience is permission based (profile or permission set) and therefore user access can be selective. The new experience is more than a cosmetic update, a number of object-specific features (e.g. Account Insights, Opportunity Workspace) are introduced that increase the functional richness provided and deliver a more focused view than the generic interaction patterns applied in the Aloha interface.

Lightning Experience – Visualforce Support – Beta
Visualforce support in Salesforce Lighting Experience will be GA in the Spring ’16 release, for Winter ’16 this is desginated a beta status. Support in this context means rendering with the Aloha look and feel, pages will not inherit a Lighting Experience visual style via the container, instead Visualforce pages will need to be redeveloped using Lightning Components and the Lightning Design System to reflect the new visual style. Where investments have been made in Visualforce (ISVs for example) the lack of migration path could represent a significant amount of work. The Lightning Design System (LDS) provides the CSS and design guidelines necessary to develop user interface components that are consistent with the Lightning Experience visual design.

Platform Cache
A new Force.com platform cache has been added that supports both org-level and session-level data caching. The cache can be accessed from Apex via the Cache namespace and provides obvious performance and reliability benefits. A Session cache has been required for Visualforce for some time to help reduce viewstate pressure, the Org cache will remove the need for Custom Setting based solutions for shared/global data. Available cache space can be distributed across partitions to provide control over application-level usage.

Apex Debugger
An extension to the Eclipse based Force.com IDE that provides support for breakpoints. This is a major advancement for Apex development. Step Over, Step Into, Run To… all the usual breakpoint related features are supported. At long last Apex has some degree of basic parity with other languages where this capability is taken for granted. The release notes mention that for some customers the Apex Debugger may incur additional costs, the detail of which is yet to be seen.

Process Builder – Query Bucketing
The Lighting Process Builder is a powerful new platform automation feature – unfortunately to date Processes have not been bulk-safe and have a tendency to throw platform limit exceptions during bulk record operations; typically Soql query limit exceptions. The mitigation for which has been to suppress the batch size to a safe point – a reasonable but not entirely satisfactory resolution. With the Winter ’16 release Soql queries within a transaction are bucketed, meaning combined, to reduce the overall number of queries executed. In principle, this practice enables the limit to be avoided and the transaction to complete. This feels like a temporary resolution to the problem while a more significant re-engineering takes place, I understand that the issues here are not trivial.

Writeable External Objects
An obvious next step for Lighting Connect – the ability to write back to External Objects. Previously External Objects have provided read-only views on the external datasets. The new write support covers OData and custom Apex adapters but not the Salesforce adapter. Record modifications via the UI occur synchronously, while Apex invoked changes are applied via an asynchronous queue.

Extensible Community Templates
Winter ’16 Community Builder templates are now extensible meaning additional Salesforce functionality, content and navigation paths can be configured extending the available features beyond the constraints of the predefined templates. This additional level of configuration takes place directly within the Community Builder, removing the need to use Site.com Studio. Winter ’16 template pages are compatible with Lightning technology meaning Lighting components can be used. This topic is huge but suffice to say the new streamlined development workflow and ability to extend the pre-defined templates to new use cases both represent a significant step forward for Community Templates.

Broadcast Groups – Pilot
Chatter Groups, whether public, private or unlisted can now be configured to allow only the group owner or manager to create posts. Anyone who’s used Chatter groups extensively will recognise the requirement to support one-way, focused communication and to avoid off-topic posts. I can think of a few Salesforce partner community groups that will be implementing this feature asap.

Chatter Questions – Similar Questions and Articles
Chatter Questions now supports the display of Similar Questions and Knowledge Articles inline while typing the question text. An obvious extension, to a highly useful feature, that should reduce the level of duplicate questions and increase the consistency in answers provided, particularly where deflection occurs via knowledge base article.

Restricted Picklists – Pilot
A new “Strictly enforce picklist values” attribute for picklist fields can be used to prevent input of values outside of the defined list via the data APIs. This new feature should be highly beneficial to anyone loading data and avoids the historic silent-error problem where picklist data mismatches go unnoticed.

More Rollup Summary Fields
The new limit is 25 per-object, replacing the old limit of 10. RSF are a great platform feature; incredibly powerful, intuitive for the end-user and quick to implement.

Once again the annual Dreamforce event has been and gone leaving most practitioners with an uncomfortable knowledge deficit in terms of the real detail of the wealth of new innovations announced. This autumn period, post-Dreamforce, is often a time for investigation; piecing together information gathered from press releases, blog post, social media and event session replays.

This post provides the output of my own brief investigations into the Salesforce1 Lightning announcement. Note, I may be vague or incorrect in some areas, I have made assumptions (safe I hope).

Salesforce1 Lightning – What is it?
Salesforce1 Lightning is the next generation of the Salesforce1 Platform, it is framed specifically as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) play and heralded as the world’s number 1. The platform is comprised of a number of new and re-branded technologies that collectively target the rapid delivery of cross-device, responsive applications via clicks-not-code. Responsive in this context relating to dynamic components that adapt their layout to the viewing environment, to provide an optimised viewing experience, regardless of the dimensions (i.e. a single view layer that supports desktop computers, smartphones, tablets and wearables).

Salesforce1 Lightning – Key Features
– Lightning Framework (GA now)
Saleforce developed UI framework for rapid web application development based on the single-page model, loosely coupled components and event-driven programming. The underlying Aura Framework was open-sourced last year and is used internally by Salesforce for the development of Salesforce1 plus recently introduced platform functionality (Opportunity Splits UI etc.). The Lightning Framework represents the availability of a subset of the Aura Framework functionality as a platform service for custom application development.

– Lightning Components (beta now, GA Spring 2015)
In order to build with the Salesforce1 Lightning Framework we need components. Components represent cleanly encapsulated units of functionality from which user interactions are comprised (i.e. apps). Component communication is supported by an event-based-architecture.

Standard Components – e.g. Button, Report Chart, Chatter Feed. Standard Components enable custom applications to be composed that inherit the Lightning UI (meaning the Salesforce1 UI).

Custom Components. Using the Lightning Component Framework, custom components can be developed to deliver any required experience (style, branding, function etc.). Developers build components with predominantly client-side behaviours, Apex can be employed to provide server-side controller functionality.

AppExchange Component. 3rd party commercial components installed from the AppExchange.

– Lightning App Builder (beta Spring 2015)
As the name implies the App Builder enables application composition through the drag-and-drop of components – meaning no-code. The builder provides Desktop, Laptop, Tablet, Phone and Smart Watch views onto which optimal component layouts are configured – the responsive behaviour to the components themselves therefore applies within the device type view – this makes good sense as an optimal laptop experience is not the phone view with proportionally bigger components. This approach is commonplace, wix.com for example works this way – i.e. build a generic device type specific view with components that adjust to the device specific viewing environment.

– Lightning Process Builder (GA Spring 2015)
Re-branded Force.com Flow / Visual Workflow functionality. In this context the point being that the business process logic is configurable through a drag-and-drop visual tool. Edit: my assumption here in relation to re-branding may well be incorrect, it has been suggested that the tool is in fact a distinct technology from Force.com Flow and may coexist. I’ll update this when I understand more – the functional overlap between Force.com Flow and Process Builder looks to be significant.

– Lightning Schema Builder (GA now)
Re-branded Schema Builder functionality. In this context the point being that the data schema is open to visual (i.e. drag-and-drop) manipulation.

– Lightning Connect (GA now)
Re-branded Platform Connect, or External Objects. The ability to configure virtual objects that query external data sources in real-time via the OData protocol. Connect underpins the concept of real-time external data access via the Salesforce1 platform and its constituent mobile applications.

– Lightning Community Builder (beta now, GA Spring 2015)
As the name implies a drag-and-drop tool for the configuration of Salesforce Communities plus the content delivered.

Entry Points
Salesforce1 Lightning Components can be accessed in the following ways.

Standalone App – access via /NAMESPACE/APPNAME.app
Salesforce1 Mobile App Tabs – create a Tab linked to a Lightning Component and add to the Mobile Navigation Menu.
Salesforce1 Mobile App Extensions – currently in Pilot, a means by which custom components can override standard components.

Future – All Visualforce entry points should ultimately become options for Lightning Components. This one is definitely an assumption. Standard components with which exhibit the standard Salesforce (Aloha) styling would be required for this.

Considerations
The following list represents some initial thoughts regarding the significance of Salesforce1 Lightning – formed without the insight gained through practical experience.

– Mobile-first.
The design principle is simple, the most effective way to build compelling user experiences across multiple devices is to start with the simplest (or perhaps smallest) case, i.e. the mobile. Note, the introduction of wearables possibly invalidates this slightly. The alternate approach of trying to shoe-horn complex desktop experiences onto smaller viewing environments rarely produces anything worthwhile.

– Rapid Development.
Quickly, faster, speed-of-business plus various other speed-related adverbs litter the press releases for Salesforce1 Lightning. If the name itself isn’t sufficient to highlight this, the platform is all about rapid development. In context rapid is realised by configuration-over-code; assembling apps with pre-fabricated, road-tested components delivers the shortest development cycle. That said, regardless of whatever form development takes a development lifecycle is absolutely necessary – the vision of analysts configuring apps over lunch and releasing immediately to business users is prone to disaster; I don’t believe this to be the message of Salesforce1 Lightning however.

– Technical Barriers versus Organisational Friction.
Removing technical barriers to rapid application development is only one part of the equation, organisations need to be culturally ready to embrace and therefore benefit from such agility. Building an enterprise app in a week makes little sense if it takes 3 months for acceptance, approval and adoption processes to run. The concept of turning IT departments into centres of innovation is an incredibly powerful aspiration, however this relies heavily on empowerment, trust and many other agile principles some organisations struggle with.

– Development model.
The Lightning development model is fully consistent with the age-old Salesforce philosophy of rapid declarative development via pre-fabricated componentry. Application architects, admins, analysts etc. assemble the apps with components supplied by Salesforce, built in-house or procured from the AppExchange. Developers will therefore focus more on building robust and reusable components than actual applications – which makes good sense assuming appropriate skills are applied to component specification and application design. The model requires non-technical resource to adopt a development mindset, this may be problematic for some.

– Developer Skills.
To build with the Salesforce1 Lightning Component Framework developers must be proficient in JavaScript, beyond intermediate level in my view. Lightning is a comprehensive component-based client-server UI framework with an event driven architecture. Developers with previous exposure limited to basic JavaScript augmentations to Visualforce face a learning curve. Anyone still under the false impression that JavaScript programming is simple compared to languages such as Java, C, C++ etc. may want to reconsider this before embarking on a Lightning project.

– Use Cases.
The viability of the proposed development model may ultimately come down to the complexity of the use cases/user experiences that can be supported without reverting to custom component development. By their very nature mobile interactions should be simplistic, but for desktop interactions it will be interesting to understand the scope of the potential for complex applications.

– Adoption.
Salesforce1 Lightning follows a similar paradigm to both Site.com and Force.com Flow, where historically technically oriented tasks are made possible for non-technical users; drag and drop visual composition of business process realisations and interactive web site development respectively. Both technologies, as innovative and empowering as they are, do not appear to have radically changed the development models to which they pertain. An obvious question therefore is whether the empowering technology alone is enough to drive adoption.

References
Aura Documentation Site
Lightning Components Developer’s Guide
Lightning QuickStart