The collection of components can be used alongside other services in the Lightning collection from Salesforce, such as the Lightning Data Service, Lightning Locker, and the Base Lightning Component library.

Until now, if a developer wanted to build a Lightning component, they had to use Aura, a modular programming model developed by Salesforce for large-scale client-side application development on the web. The rise of JavaScript as the main standard for web development has meant Aura has become increasingly sidelined, hence the launch of the JavaScript-based alternative.

Existing Lightning components built with Aura will work side by side with Lightning Web Components without any need to rebuild anything. Aura components and Lightning web components can coexist on the same page. Aura components can include Lightning web components, and the two component types share the same base Lightning components as these were already implemented as Lightning web components, and Aura components and Lightning web components share the same underlying services.

The components in the new framework provide a layer of specialized Salesforce services on top of the core stack. There's a set of over 70 UI components all built as custom elements, along with the Lightning Data Service which provides declarative access to Salesforce data and metadata, data caching, and data synchronization. Alongside this is a User Interface API, an underlying service that makes Base Lightning Components and the Lightning Data Service metadata aware.