The Art of Micro Frontends

Apply your experience of web development with HTML and JavaScript to build micro frontends for large-scale web projects using frameworks such as React and popular web tooling such as Node.js with Express or webpack

Key Features

• Cut through the complexities of designing a monolithic web architecture using micro frontend architecture
• Explore architecture patterns for building large-scale applications
• Learn how to build, test, and secure your micro frontends efficiently

Book Description

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).

What you will learn

• Understand how to choose the right micro frontend architecture
• Design screens for compositional UIs
• Create a great developer experience for micro frontend solutions
• Achieve enhanced user experiences with micro frontends
• Introduce governance and boundary checks for managing distributed frontends
• Build scalable modular web applications from scratch or by migrating an existing monolith

Who this book is for

This book is for software/solution architects or (mostly lead) developers as well as web developers and frontend engineers. Beginner-level knowledge of HTML and CSS along with a solid understanding of JavaScript programming and its ecosystem, including Node.js and NPM, is assumed.

Table of Contents

1. Why Microfrontends?
2. Common Challenges and Pitfalls
3. Deployment Scenarios
4. Domain Decomposition
5. Types of Micro Frontend Architectures
6. The Web Approach
7. Server-Side Composition
8. Edge-Side Composition
9. Client-Side Composition
10. SPA Composition
11. Siteless UIs
12. Preparing Teams and Stakeholders
13. Dependency Management, Governance and Security
14. Impact on UX and Screen Design
15. Developer Experience
16. Case Studies

Florian Rappl is a solution architect working on distributed web applications for digital transformation and IoT projects. His main interest lies in the implementation of micro frontends and their impact on teams and business models.

As the lead architect he helped to create outstanding web applications for many industry leading companies. He regularly gives lectures on software design patterns and web development. Florian won multiple prizes for his work over the years and is recognized as a Microsoft MVP for development technologies.

He started his career in software engineering before studying physics and helping to build an energy-efficient supercomputer. Florian currently lives in Munich, Germany, with his wife and two daughters.