Book Image

The Art of Micro Frontends

By : Florian Rappl
Book Image

The Art of Micro Frontends

By: Florian Rappl

Overview of this book

Micro frontend is a web architecture for frontend development borrowed from the idea of microservices in software development, where each module of the frontend is developed and shipped in isolation to avoid complexity and a single point of failure for your frontend. Complete with hands-on tutorials, projects, and self-assessment questions, this easy-to-follow guide will take you through the patterns available for implementing a micro frontend solution. You’ll learn about micro frontends in general, the different architecture styles and their areas of use, how to prepare teams for the change to micro frontends, as well as how to adjust the UI design for scalability. Starting with the simplest variants of micro frontend architectures, the book progresses from static approaches to fully dynamic solutions that allow maximum scalability with faster release cycles. In the concluding chapters, you'll reinforce the knowledge you’ve gained by working on different case studies relating to micro frontends. By the end of this book, you'll be able to decide if and how micro frontends should be implemented to achieve scalability for your user interface (UI).
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Hive - Introducing Frontend Modularization
6
Section 2: Dry Honey - Implementing Micro frontend Architectures
14
Section 3: Busy Bees - Scaling Organizations

Advantages and disadvantages

The major advantages of this approach are the similarity and pureness in relation to microservices, as well as its simplicity. No fancy JavaScript techniques, frontend frameworks, or requirements on the actual web server technology.

The major issues also come inheritably with these advantages. For instance, since the frontend has a much higher need for consistency using common UX patterns, it's quite difficult to stay close to microservices. These are, by definition, not necessarily consistent. Likewise, the simple approach will hit limitations quite fast.

Looking at the limitations, we see that there are only two ways of referring or using different micro frontends: links (for full page transitions) and iframes (for individual components/fragments). We will discuss both in full detail later in this chapter.

So, when should the web approach be used? The web approach makes sense when consistency is not necessarily required. It also makes sense...