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Microfrontends should be a last resort

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Re: Microfrontends should be a last resort

#71

Post by davepeck »

JCharante wrote: post #59
davepeck wrote: post #34

"Microfrontends" is a new term for me. Are there specific frameworks that embody the concept (and if so, where on GitHub would I look)? Is it more of a broad architectural pattern?

It’s not really a framework. I mean that’s the whole point of not being so tightly knit. Imagine you have a website with some kind of router for different paths. You might also have a unique domain per market (e.g. amazon.co.uk or amazon.jp) / -> home page repo /search -> search repo /products/xyz -> products repo /products/xyz/review -> product review repo It might seem crazy to have so many repos, but each of these…

Thanks, that's helpful.

Amazon famously built the company with OBIDOS, a monolith; these days, backend microservices abound — as do what we’re calling here microfrontends, although my understanding is at AMZN they are granular not just to market-specific domains or route prefixes, but sometimes also to pre-defined sections of a final rendered page. Would love to hear from AMZN engineers that work on such things.

Re: Microfrontends should be a last resort

#72

Post by oooyay »

Aurornis wrote: post #17

> Microfrontends are very popular on the conference circuit, so I am probably about to make future job interviews awkward by criticisng them. This has been my experience with conferences lately: Way too much emphasis on the next big trend, to the point of being counterproductive for actually getting work done Certain teams and companies live and die by conference trends. If you can't also show interest in those trend…

Disclosure that I'm closer to full stack/generalist than frontend engineer.

Have you tried not going to conferences? I'm saying that with a good bit of sarcasm, but frankly look at where a lot of these things occur and who speaks at them. They occur in huge cities that curiously have beaucoup tech companies; companies that we know incentivize promotion based on things like "personal brand" and new project development as opposed to impact. Companies that often time give lots of money to those same conferences.

My point here is that conferences today are inherently inorganic and you'd get a lot more value reading long form blogs and going to meet ups to talk to people about the curious problems they have.

Re: Microfrontends should be a last resort

#73

Post by Pxtl »

Imho the web has done ferocious damage to modularization with its history of "global everything". css classes are global, element ids are global, the root Javascript namespace is global. This made constructing modular web code aggressively difficult, and only now we've got technologies that make modular components in the web manageable. That's a lot of historical velocity to overcome.

All these nonsense approaches like "microfrontends" feel like they're still fighting that war.

We're finally at the point there reasonable isolated components are totally doable within the web platform. We just need to lay down the rules for good practice to keep the inherent globalness of the web from creeping back in and ruining everything.

Re: Microfrontends should be a last resort

#74

Post by simantel »

leemcalilly wrote: post #50

Isn’t a “micro front-end” just like a Turbo Frame in Rails now? Except, easier to manage within a monolith?

The microfrontends that OP is referring to are generally standalone single-page apps which sit underneath some kind of top-level router that loads the correct MFE as needed. Often these are split up by functional area or product at a company with multiple products.

Re: Microfrontends should be a last resort

#75

Post by bdougherty »

bluGill wrote: post #44
vilunov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After years of working with various microservice-based systems, I got the impression that the whole idea of "microservices" means ignoring various nuances of particular products and organizations and just splitting your system in a pinky-sized codebases and services. You are completely right, every project is different, and that's why the general idea of microservices is bad. Split your services where there are techn…

Your code structure should match your org chart is the best advice I've seen for splitting code. Each team in the org maintains their own micro service. They do whatever they want within it, but when going to a different one they go to an interface. It isn't perfect, but it seems to work the best.

Until the org chart is reorganized, then what?

Re: Microfrontends should be a last resort

#78

Post by willsmith72 »

gaoshan wrote: post #65
Aurornis wrote: post #17

> Microfrontends are very popular on the conference circuit, so I am probably about to make future job interviews awkward by criticisng them. This has been my experience with conferences lately: Way too much emphasis on the next big trend, to the point of being counterproductive for actually getting work done Certain teams and companies live and die by conference trends. If you can't also show interest in those trend…

>They hired a lot of "smart" developers, but they also took forever to ship anything. Oh man does this resonate with me. Some of the "smartest" people we've hired have also been the slowest to deliver as they waffle and perfect and theorize and play with the tasks they have.

Yep, more and more I think of the engineers I want on my team as "product engineers" over software engineers.

Overengineering is the devil

Re: Microfrontends should be a last resort

#79

Post by tsss »

andy_ppp wrote: post #33

I think microfrontends are the ultimate extension of what I call "the myth of code reuse". Everyone thinks because they can create "small reusable slices" of full frontend code that this comes for free without a load of problems that get in the way of the mythical land. The only issue is everyone who has tried microfrontends is universally full of regret. Other attempts at this are: 1) having an enforced centralised…

Microfrontends are about independent development, not code reuse. They work fine if you understand their purpose.
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