Patterns for micro-frontends

Erik Dörnenburg (ThoughtWorks)

15:55–16:40 Wednesday, 6 November 2019

Location: Hall A2

Application architecture

Secondary topics: Anti-Pattern, Best Practice, Hands-on

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Who is this presentation for?

Developers and architects

Level

Intermediate

Description

Architectures based on microservices have spread rapidly in the past few years. Organizations are drawn to the promise of independent evolvability, which allows you to reduce cycle time and scale development. At the same time, in many software solutions the majority of the code base is now running in the web browser, which leads to an often underestimated challenge: the software design of the frontends. All too often, teams have well-structured services running on the servers but a big, entangled monolith in the browser.

Erik Dörnenburg explores a number of patterns harvested from practical use that allow teams to avoid the dreaded frontend monolith and build software solutions that fully deliver on the promise of microservices. The patterns range from the simple—using edge-side includes to do dynamic, yet cacheable, server-side composition—to the complex, including an example of how to compose a React application inside the web browser.

Prerequisite knowledge

A basic understanding of modern web architectures and microservices
A working knowledge of React or similar JavaScript frameworks (useful but not required)

What you'll learn

Understand why micro-frontends are essential and that proven patterns to implement them exist
See a selection of the most common patterns in detail

Erik Dörnenburg

ThoughtWorks

Erik Dörnenburg is a software developer, consultant, and head of technology at ThoughtWorks, where he helps clients with writing custom software. Over the years, Erik has worked with many different technologies and technology platforms, always curious to understand the potential they offer to solve real-world problems. Erik’s career began in the early nineties, and throughout it he has been an advocate of agile values and open source software. Over the past 10 years, he has spoken at many international conferences, contributed to a few books, and maintained several open source projects.