Micro frontends were proposed for the first time in 2016. Micro frontends have recently gained popularity as businesses seek easy modern web development. More and more companies are adopting ways to divide frontend monoliths into smaller portions that can be built, tested, and published while still appearing to users as a whole product.
“Micro-frontend designs break down a frontend application into little, semi-independent “micro-apps” that are tenuously connected together. Large initiatives, such as migrations from legacy codebases, can benefit from this.”
Today, we’ll look at how the recent trend of breaking up frontend monoliths into many smaller, more manageable components might help frontend coding teams be more productive and efficient. Also, how it will benefit you if it is implemented.
What is micro frontend architecture?
Basically, micro frontend architecture is the introduction of microservices in frontend development. This makes the work less complex and easy to execute. The current tendency is to create functionality and a solid single-page application that rests on top of micro service architecture. The frontend layer, which is frequently developed by a distinct team, expands and becomes more difficult to maintain with time. This is referred to as a Frontend Monolith.
Micro Frontends is a concept in which a website or web app is viewed as a collection of features owned by different teams. Each team in charge of the structure has different areas of expertise. All teams are cross-trained and work on the same features from start to finish, from database to user interface. Micro Frontends is clearly a more friendly and less bulky term than the past systems.
Why Micro Frontend Matters & Core Ideas behind it
The frontend of today’s apps is becoming increasingly vital, while the backend is getting less so. Most of the code is written in Micro Frontend Architecture, as monolithic approaches do not scale well for larger projects. There needs to be a tool for breaking it down into smaller, self-contained pieces. The Micro frontend is the solution to this problem. Micro Frontend programming is written entirely in JavaScript, and it may be used with any of the JavaScript frameworks or transferred from one to another. Some of the core ideas behind Micro Frontend services are:
Open towards technology
Without needing to collaborate with other teams, each team should be allowed to choose and improve their stack. Custom Elements are an excellent method to keep implementation details hidden while giving others a neutral interface.
Team Code Isolation
Even if everyone uses the same framework, don’t share the runtime. Create self-contained, standalone apps. Use global variables and shared states sparingly.
Prefixes for Teams should be established
Where isolation is not yet practicable, agree on naming conventions to avoid collisions and clarify ownership, namespace CSS, Events, Local Storage, and Cookies.
Favor Native Browser Features
Rather than constructing a worldwide PubSub system, use Browser Events for communication. If you really must create a cross-team API, keep it as straightforward as possible.
Create a Resilient Site
Even if JavaScript failed or was not yet performed, your feature should be useful. To increase perceived performance, use Universal Rendering and Progressive Enhancement.
Scalability
We can scale up an application to multiple teams using the modular and decoupled micro frontends design since a new frontend element or changes to the existing frontend have no impact on the remainder of the frontend or the work of other teams. As a result, teams can choose the right tech stack for their microservice and focus on continuous growth.
Way to adopt Micro Frontend Architecture?
There are several steps of how to adopt Micro Frontend Architecture:
Browser Integration
Web components allow you to import Frontend elements into your Web applications. Together with the back-end, these fragments can be packaged as Microservices. Logic and visual representation were crammed together in the services that were established. Using this method, front-end applications reduced to routing(your app’s ability to do different things depending on the current url) make decisions about which set of components to display and how events between distinct web components are orchestrated.
Web Components
Web components help create reusable components that can be used in web applications. Currently, browsers such as Chrome, Opera, and Firefox are using such web components. These components are made up of four major pieces that can be used independently or together.
Custom Elements
Custom Elements allow you to create your own HTML tags and elements. CSS styles and scripts are unique to each element. Create your own tags, apply CSS styles, and use scripts to add behaviors. To avoid conflicts with new HTML elements, the only standard requirement is the use of a hyphen. Create a list of check-outs using custom elements and custom tags, for example, and you’ll have Web components and element lifecycle callbacks. These lifecycle callbacks enable the definition of component-specific behavior.
Shadow DOM
The DOM in Shadow DOM is the API that integrates HTML, CSS, and JavaScript inside a Web Component, which is segregated from the main document’s DOM. This separation is analogous to when one user builds API services. The API service’s consumer is unaware of the service’s internals; the only thing that matters to a consumer is API queries. Their internal behavior is not visible to the outside world unless explicitly allowed by design, and it does not affect the DOM document in which they exist. The most common way for web components to communicate is through events.
HTML Imports
HTML imports are the packaging mechanism for the web components. They help DOM identify the location of a Web Component. In the context of Microservices, import the remote location of the service that includes the component to be used. HTML imports are a technique for reusing and including HTML documents in other HTML documents. Predefined components as HTML imports, each of which has its own styles and scripts, decide on the top level that HTML import currently exposes in DOM, and the imported page handles the rest.
HTML Templates
HTML templates hold client-side content which is not rendered when a page is loaded. They’re new HTML tags that let us make templates for your components.
With micro frontends, the architecture looks like:
Micro-frontend Architecture Benefits
A micro-frontend has the following advantages over a monolithic frontend:
- Micro frontends enable you to update your website in a more iterative manner.
- Micro frontends provide you with the ability to simplify the user experience.
- Codebases are much smaller and manageable.
- It promoted reusability through a complete process along with case management.
- It enables you to quickly generate distinct perspectives on your processes that are relevant to each individual’s function.
- Teams can operate separately, allowing for faster development. It especially helps for bigger projects with multiple frontend teams.
- Multiple frameworks can be used in your applications.
- Independence in terms of deployment. The distribution of your micro frontend will have no impact on the rest of the app. The adjustments will directly impact the component of the business process that they have affected.
- Parts of the frontend can be upgraded, updated, or even rewritten more easily than before.
- You don’t have to maintain track of the entire program with micro frontends. A team examines a particular micro frontend that has been modified or enlarged without affecting the rest of the app.
- A development team is free to select the technology.
- Experts can be hired more easily. Micro frontends hire people to work on a specific portion of the app where a certain tech stack is utilized. Thus, they don’t need to be familiar with technologies used by other teams.
- As each feature can be tested separately, testing is made easier.
Challenges faced in Micro-frontend
There are certain challenges faced in every technology, and so is the case in Micro-frontend.
Parent/child integration: The issue of ensuring the parent program presents the child application with the same consistency and performance as a monolith application is introduced by a micro-frontend.
Operational overhead: A micro-frontend application includes establishing and managing distinct infrastructure for all teams rather than managing a single frontend application.
Consistent user experience: The child applications must use the same UI components, CSS libraries, interactions, error handling, and more in order to provide a consistent user experience. For child applications that are at various stages of development, maintaining consistency in the user experience can be problematic.
Conclusion
Micro Frontends are used to divide a huge web application into segments. Whether you should use micro frontends or not is dependent on your business plan. Your technology choices, codebases, teams, and release methods (CI/CD) should all be able to work and change independently of one another in the best-case scenario.
Micro frontend designs are especially advantageous for large projects with remote teams and a huge number of requests. As a result, many huge firms are already using micro frontend architecture and you should as well. Giants such as Spotify, and IKEA have already successfully implemented the technology into their systems.
In Micro Frontend Architecture, ensure the core and integration are as basic as feasible. Establish certain standards and norms to reduce disagreements amongst teams working on the same product. Communication with the team is essential to ensuring that everything runs smoothly. All of these Micro Frontend Architecture best practices contribute to the solution of a single point: scalability. Companies can adjust more swiftly to market developments and offer customer experiences that propel their businesses ahead using micro frontends.