Scale it the easy way

Introduction to

micro frontends

...how to use all frameworks at once

Hi, I'm Kuba Holak

R&D Developer @

Front-end perspective

time

complexity

Monolith

View

Logic

Data

a large single upright block of stone, especially one shaped into or serving as a pillar or monument.

Microservices

 

single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.

View

Feature logic + data

Feature logic + data

Feature logic + data

Feature logic + data

Microservice

Microservice

Microservice

API

Frontend SPA

Microservice

Microservice

Microservice

Microservice

Microservice

Feature

Feature

Feature

Feature

Feature

Front end

Backend

Data

Micro Frontends

The idea behind Micro Frontends is to think about a website or web app as a composition of features which are owned by independent teams. Each team has a distinct area of business or mission it cares about and specialises in. 

micro-frontends.org

Let's split our UI into separate, self contained and independent  feature apps.

User

Search

Job Offers

Brands

Benefits?

Increase productivity - ship features faster

Minimise tech debt

Increase  autonomy of development teams

Avoid tech stack lock-in

  

Progressive rewrites of big codebases

There is no single tech approach.

Let's see how others do it.

Project Mosaic

Stich Framework

OpBox 

SINGLE SPA

Web components are a set of web platform APIs that allow you to create new custom, reusable, encapsulated HTML tags to use in web pages and web apps.

Custom elements

class UserView extends HTMLElement {...}
window.customElements.define('user-view', UserView);

<user-widget />

<search-widget />

<job-offers-app />

<brands-widget />

UI Shell

router and basic layout

Invoicing

Support

Backup

Scheduler

  • small shell app responsible for providing user context and Amplify methods to each sub app
  • every route is a sub app
  • every sub app can provide sub routes
  • each sub app is a js file exposing a factory of web component

Nordcloud Insight UI Shell

<Router history={history}>
    <Home path="/" />
    <UserPage path="/mysettings" />
    <PageNotFound path="/404" />
    <SubApp path="/:subappname" setup={{ ...amplifySetup }} />
</Router>
function initializeSubApp(routeDesc, setup) {
  loadScriptFromUrl(routeDesc).then(({ routeDesc, setup }) =>
    window.subAppFactory.init(
      { title: routeDesc.title, ...setup },
      routeDesc.component
    );
    //...return store action with sub app creation success
  )
}

Sub app setup

returns a factory with init() method, which should register a web-component under provided DOMString tags

function init(setup = {}, tag = "my-component"){
    ReactCustomElement(<App setup={setup} />, tag);
} 
 

ReactCustomElement is a custom tailored function that mounts a react app into shadow dom based web component.

Micro frontends - is it whorth it?

It depends.

Scale

Micro Frontends architecure

comes with initial costs. 

https://martinfowler.com

Final thoughts

  • avoid shared state - use a "store" per micro app
  • create shared UI elements library
  • measure performance
  • you may not need a framework :(

Thank you

Introduction to micro frontends - meetjs summit 2018

By Kuba Holak

Introduction to micro frontends - meetjs summit 2018

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