Web Clients Experience

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Web Clients Experience

Peter Skala is an active software developer and architect with more then three decades of experience in this area.
The projects, he has been working on, can be found here. In many cases, as a lead developer or software architect, he had the responsibility of designing and/or implementing user interfaces fulfilling customer requirements in the best possible way.

Little bit special for the front ends compared to back ends is, that the live span of the external libraries used to boost their implementation, is usually shorter than the live span of projects they are used in.
It is very tempting to disregard this fact in the initial development phase, especially, when the project owner believes, that there is no alternative to his cool tool selection. The costs for this can be high.

Normally sooner than later, some requirements come up, which can not be fulfilled by the selected tool, no matter how cool or fashionable it is. Everything can be solved somehow, but if the the project and maintenance costs matters for you, you will opt for keeping the software architecture open for change from the beginning, also on the front end.

In the last decade, there was a strong inclination to large SPAs. The costs these always growing single page monsters brought with them, motivate us to look for alternatives, which are easier to manage, open for change and open for split.
One possible approach is to use micro-clients so that the interfaces to and from them are easier to grasp and easier to maintain.

Let us have a look, how is it possible to use a several React front end apps instead of one large SPA and still reuse the components between them and keep all the apps and shared parts in a single repository.
Another interesting aspect of React apps in an enterprise context with microservices on the back end, is the question of Backend for Frontend (BfF). How many pros do you see for using a JavaScript BfF, how many pros for going directly for Java BfF?

Our solution should rely on base technology standards, avoiding tooling hell of proprietary solutions.  

If you are interested enough, let us have look at a 'standard' architecture of a microservices-based SPA React project and then at an alternative microclient architecture, including source code and build scripts.

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