A Beginner’s Guide To The Micro Frontend Architecture
Micro Frontend architecture is a buzzword that marked 2016 as part of the Web 3.0 wave.
The front end is in the midst of a renaissance. The days of enormous, monolithic JS applications are long gone, and developers are seeking more refined and maintainable paths towards building their user interfaces. One way to do this is by using the Micro Frontend architecture.
The first wave of JavaScript frameworks was created primarily to improve the view, but most recently the focus has shifted to the front-end app itself. This new wave of JavaScript frameworks is micro frontend architecture (MFA) and I’d like to show you what MFA is and how it can help you build for today’s modern web.
Micro frontend architecture is a new “micro” approach to developing applications by breaking them up into tiny independent chunks of functionality called micro-frontends.
The micro frontend architecture, also known as isomorphic JavaScript or universal JavaScript, is a philosophical idea. It's the idea that your website can run both on the server and in the browser, but the content is rendered by this. JavaScript is dynamically generated by a server-side language framework like Python or Ruby on Rails.
In this article, we will examine what micro-frontend architecture is, its principles, and how you can integrate it into your next project.
What is Micro Frontend Architecture
Micro Frontend Architecture, often referred to as “MFA” for short, is a method of writing applications that aligns the architecture of your application with the different components of your application. MFA is an alternative to end-to-end (E2E) or full-stack frameworks that attempt to solve every problem on a single stack.
Micro Frontend Architecture is a new way to web development that puts business logic on the front side. MFA puts all non-UI logic into “microservices” which can be developed, tested, deployed and scaled independently of each other. This decoupling helps build more testable and loosely coupled applications.
Micro Frontend Architecture is a relatively new approach to front-end development. You’ve probably heard of some similar techniques like atomic design, modular design, and component-based design. Those are all good approaches too, but they don’t mean much without a solid structure in place.
Micro Frontend Architecture is essentially a whole new approach to front-end design. While many developers are using Single Page Applications (SPAs) for their projects, Micro Frontend Architecture advocates for the use of the SPA alongside a server that ultimately makes your site load faster.
It is an approach to building web applications that aim to decouple client-side application components using feature/functionality focused files.
Microservices or modular design?
With the rise in popularity of microservice architectures, developers today have been facing this question recently. Many articles demonstrate why and how to make your application microservices - but what about the customer? Part of designing a successful architecture is considering how it will be used and how much effort will be required to maintain and support the backend. While both microservice and modular design have their own merits in application development? Understanding this will let you choose the most appropriate option for your project - be it lower costs or more agility.
Microservices architecture makes it possible to have small services instead of a “monolith”, which is another word for a very large, single-unit program or application.
Microservices are heralded by many as the new architecture for software. If you're familiar with WCF and other forms of MFA or modular design, you'll see right away why this is a better choice for many systems versus the all too common "monolithic" frameworks.
MFA refers to an application architecture style where it is made up of a collection of loosely coupled services. For example, one service may handle user authentication and registration; another may handle sending notification emails, etc. They are all designed to be modular and loosely coupled so that they can scale independently.
It emphasizes lightweight services that do one thing and do it well. A microservices-based application is composed of a collection of independently deployable services, which allows for continuous deployment and faster turnaround time.
This allows us to define teams based on business capabilities instead of technical solutions. By embracing a modular approach and using MFA, we can create great building blocks such as functional and technical capabilities, allow autonomous adaptations, have easier maintenance, and protect from dependencies.
This development technique encourages breaking down the functionality of a software’s system into small, independently-developed modules called microservices.
One of the rules is to divide your software system into several subsystems (modules) with minimal communication between them. The purpose is to reduce coupling and increase the chances that a defect in one will not affect another.
