Micro means small form. And the front-end is the graphical interface of the web. Together, Micro Frontends means the portions of a webpage. This brings a new era of development. Before, you have to work on the total website page. If you are working individually, then you will not face many problems.
When you are working as a team, then everyone will work on a single page. This will create a conflict in the webpage’s work. Microfrontends divide this frontend web page into a small form. This allows team members to work on individual small parts as a single project. Also, if you are developing alone, you can focus on little details on the front ends as they are divided into multiple small shapes. This makes the front-end development process quite easy for everyone.
In this article, we will discuss these interesting micro frontends, their benefits, and how to merge them on our web pages. So, let’s begin.
Benefits of Micro Frontends
The importance of front-end and micro frontends technologies is increasing day by day. To understand its importance, let’s look at its benefits.
Adoption of Tech
Micro frontends are small pieces, so you can put different tech stacks into one page. This will bring versatility to the front end. It will also be easy to implement a new tech stack. This can bring new features and frameworks.
Fast Development and Deployment
Building smaller micro frontends is easier than the monolith architecture. Also, each developer can develop these small portions faster with perfection. Also, it is faster to deploy small parts than load huge ones.
Coding in different languages
In one team, different developers may have expertise in different programming languages. In monolithic architecture, you have to find common ground for everyone. In the case of micro front-ends, you can put everyone back to work.
Resource Optimization
As its size is small and easy to code, it takes and utilizes small resources. Also, you can add new functionalities to the existing codes without losing the qualities. This opens up great chances for the effective use of available resources.
High Performance
Traditional webs load multiple requests at the same time. This takes time and thus slows the performance. Micro-frontends delay long-loading modules to request faster performance.
These amazing benefits make the micro front-end popular in the technological den.
Scaling Frontend with Micro Frontend
We already know how important micro-frontend architecture is. It is also important to know how to implement the micro frontend architecture. First, we must understand the best way to split the code into small forms.
Because perfect slicing will keep the technical capabilities uniform, there are many methods to implement a micro frontend. The use of these runtime methods will depend on the application’s needs. The methods are
Server side Composition
A server service provider hosts necessary data, and you can access them through the browser. The data is already arranged before the browser request. The micro frontends are cached at Content Delivery Network (CDN) and then work on the build time.
The server then retrieves them, organizes, and assembles them. This increases the robustness of the pure client-side integration of that application.
Build Time Integration
You can do build-time integration using any components or frameworks. One of the approaches is to publish the micro frontend as a package. Then use the container apps to allow them as library dependencies. This is how you can integrate components at build time for code reuse and effective collaboration.
Runtime Integration of Micro Frontend
Generally, the runtime approach configures the micro frontends at the runtime. Package.json of the container app uses the micro frontends as a package. But they are not used to bundle the individual micro frontends. The ways to implement runtime integration are via
Via Javascript
Developers recommend runtime via javascript for its good flexibility. The <script> tag includes each micro frontend on the page. This tag renders relevant functions as per request. This script tag also tells when and where to render itself.
Via Iframes
Iframes are a type of HTML document that you can put into other HTML documents. This allows you to build pages from independent sub-pages. Also, it provides great isolation in global variables and styling.
Via Web Component
This is another alternative for runtime integration using web components. Here, every micro front end defines one HTML element for the container. This will represent the instances instead of defining a global function. There is also a custom element that remains isolated. So, you can reuse it in HTML pages and applications.
These are the most common methods of runtime to scale the micro front end into the front end. Usually, developers use them in build time integration.
Limitations of Micro Frontend
Though micro frontends offer you a great deal, it has some limitations. The micro front end gives your team a chance to work on every detail. But for that, you will need a large number of members for every detail. So, you will need a large versatile team with resources.
It is also possible that multiple developers will use many components when they work on one project. As they provide components on each detail, this will increase the project’s complexity. Also, this will require multiple testing and deployment phases. And updating coding will also be more difficult and complex.
Final Verdict
The micro front gives a new era to the front-end development process. Front-end development is important because when a client interacts with the front end. And, he will decide whether this website is best or not based on this front end.
So, the core and integration methods should be simple, intriguing, and smooth. The developers play a vital role in deciding the architecture and method for the micro front end. So, communication between team members is also important to minimize conflicts. This will eradicate the limitations of micro frontend use in development.
