Microfrontends is a new trend in the frontend world however, the idea of being able to compose an application out of other independent applications is not new. By Sergio Martino.
Previous experiences such as Java Portlets have not been very successful while other companies, such as Beamery or Spotify, have tried the Microfrontends path with mixed results.
Microfrontends is an architecture pattern that offers an alternative to the frontend monolith by breaking up the frontend into multiple frontends, each with its own lifecycle. Being able to administer an application lifecycle independently from other applications allows teams to deploy features to production faster, as they face less dependencies, a concise scope and less risk of failures.
A migration path for a Monolith is complex as it does not offer a clean way to implement incremental structural changes however, breaking changes would be packaged within a single codebase and could be managed successfully. More often than not, a migration of a Monolith simply means developing a new version alongside a legacy version: old code might be difficult to read, but it would not come with side effects.
The frontend market today offers decent alternatives to the infamous Spotify’s iframe orchestration: Webpack’s Module Federation, Open Components or technology agnostic frameworks such as Single Spa are prime solutions for implementing Microfrontends, despite their young age. Interesting!
[Read More]