S-Controls are coming back to Salesforce!

Salesforce has announced that S-Controls are coming back to Salesforce classic. For those who don’t know what S-Controls are, they were the technology before VisualForce and allowed you to create webpages and use the Salesforce JavaScript APIs to communicate with Salesforce (hence the S in S-Controls). Around 10 years ago Salesforce stopped Salesforce customers from creating new S-Controls as VisualForce had replaced the need for S-Controls, but I still find S-Controls in customers orgs. You can still edit and make changes too… well that was until this announcement!

Why are Salesforce re-enabling S-Controls?

It’s all due to Lighting! Lightning is a JavaScript framework and by bringing back S-Controls, Salesforce will allow developers to develop JavaScript based Lightning apps directly in Salesforce classic without the need of VisualForce. S-Controls are much lighter than VisualForce so you can illuminate the need for an Apex controller or even VisualForce markup! It also means new developers coming to the platform with a client who is still using the Classic UI can skip learning VisualForce/Apex and jump straight into the JavaScript world that is Lightning & S-Controls.

New ‘Add Lightning Component’ Button

New ‘Add Lightning Component’ Button

So Salesforce as expanded the S-Control functionality to allow you to easily add Lightning Components into your S-Control using the ‘Add Lightning Component’ Button (see pic).

Adoption, Adoption, Adoption

I think also another reason for re-enabling S-Controls is to allow developers & businesses a softer introduction into Lightning components & development. Lightning components/apps can be created directly in the Classic UI using S-Controls or just using regular old JavaScript. It also means that those orgs still using S-Controls can refactor the controls into Lightning components/apps more quickly without the need for VisualForce.

So in conclusion, I think it makes a lot of sense it. Let’s make S-Controls great again! 😉