Building Micro-Frontends

Chapter 1. The Frontend Landscape

I remember a time when web applications were called rich internet applications (RIAs) to differentiate them from traditional, more static corporate websites. Today, we can find many RIAs, or web applications, across the World Wide Web. There is a proliferation of online services that allow us to print business cards on demand, watch our favorite movies or live events, order a pepperoni pizza, manage our bank accounts from our comfortable sofas, and do many, many other things that make our lives easier.

As CTOs, architects, tech leads, or developers, when we start a greenfield project, we can create a single-page application or an isomorphic one, whose code can run in both the server and the client, or even work with a bunch of static pages that run in our cloud or on-premises infrastructure. While we now have such a broad range of options, not all are fit for every job. To make the right decision for our projects, we need to understand the challenges we will face along the way.

Before we jump into the topic of this book, let’s analyze the current architectures available to us when we work on a frontend application.

Micro-Frontend Applications

Micro-frontends are an emerging architecture inspired by microservices architecture. The main idea behind it is to break down a monolithic codebase into smaller parts, allowing an organization to spread out the work among autonomous teams, whether collocated or distributed, without the need to slow down ...