Micro frontend : Microservice implementation on Web Development

Abstract

With the increasing relevancy of microservice architecture style in software development, this paper aims to examine the applicability of utilizing microservice architecture style for frontend development, or micro frontend. Through going over an array of literature concerning frontend development and microservice architecture, this paper aims to document the definitions along with various advantages and disadvantages of micro frontend against monolithic architecture style, thereby trying to establish a best practice concerning when to adopt micro frontend architecture and when to migrate a monolithic to micro frontend. Moreover, this paper is also accompanied by an example project, which is a pseudo social media page, with the aim of demonstrating the migration process using the single-spa package, migrating from React framework to micro frontend system utilizing both React and Framework for its multiple micro applications. Conclusively, the paper is able to draw out the differences between the two architectures with the micro frontend proving to be significantly beneficial when applications growing into later development cycles. The example project also succeeds in documenting and demonstrating the migration process, albeit the final micro frontend system not a complete replica of the original due to limitation of documentation availability. Overall, micro frontend is still a relatively new concept and should be explored further since it advantages are of meaningful significance for large scale application.