Oct 4, 2022
Advantages of Component-Based Architecture
Component-based architecture can help you deliver optimized apps that respond to your application’s changing market needs. The best part is that you don’t need to employ expensive app experts to do it!
High-performing frontend applications nowadays are all about the customized, cohesive experience — fortunately, the technology can deliver. Organizations can easily leverage these performance and feature advantages using component-based development.
In the words of Marko Lehtimaki :
“Instead of building every application from scratch and requiring a whole team of experts and developers to work together synchronously, the work can be divided into smaller pieces.”
Component-based architecture has emerged as the go-to strategy for companies seeking to scale their frontend development operations. The shift in perception allows companies to utilize the efficiencies gained through streamlining and scaling CSS across multiple products and page templates.
In this article, you’ll better understand component-based development, its functions, documentation, tools, best practices, and much more. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
What is Component-Based Development in Software Engineering?
Component-based development is a software development method focusing on designing and developing reusable components. For instance, consider the web page with elements such as header, search bar, content body, etc. When considering the component-based architecture, all these are independent of each other and called components.
Component-based architecture has recently gained popularity among organizations such as PayPal, Spotify, and Uber, leveraging it to improve and standardize their frontend development. Due to this, more and more businesses are looking to switch from their monolithic architecture to a component-based development strategy.
Here are some approaches to consider while converting your monolithic architecture into a component-based strategy:
- Components for reusable & shared libraries
- Using the producer/consumer model
- Division by frontend & backend
Advantages of Component-Based Development
Component-based development brings many advantages beyond just having reusable code bits in your software applications. The potential benefits are too many to mention here, but here are some of the important ones:
1. Faster Development
Component-based methodologies can help teams develop high-quality software up to 60% faster than those who do not utilize this method. By creating components from reusable libraries accessible at all times, teams do not need to start from scratch with their software. They can directly select from this library without worrying about non-functional requirements such as security, usability, or performance.
2. Easier Maintenance
One of the crucial advantages of component-based architecture is that each component is independent and reusable. It helps decompose the frontend monolith into smaller and manageable components, making any upgrade or modification a breeze. Rather than modifying the code each time, you need to update the relevant components once. Later, when new updates are released or a test has to run, add it to the appropriate component-based model. Viola! It’s that simple.
3. Independent Teams
The cross-functional component teams treat the design-language system as one single truth source and create components without external assistance or interference. In this case, the components are self-contained but don’t affect the system. It will lead to forming autonomous teams because they have much freedom, flexibility, and accountability to decide how to keep their projects flowing smoothly.
4. Better Reusability
Reusability has many benefits, including writing less code for business applications. When dealing with a component-based framework, developers do not have to register the same lines of code repeatedly and can instead focus on core functionality. They can then take these same components and apply them to other apps that might serve different needs or be implemented on various platforms.
For example, consider a component that provides authentication functionality to an application. While building the component, designers have designed it so that the only thing that would change in any application built using this component would be the actual authorization logic. The component itself would remain unchanged irrespective of the application it is used in.
5. Improved UX Consistency
You risk providing inconsistent and unclear experiences to your consumers if you employ an unsupervised frontend development methodology. However, working with component-based architecture, you’ll automatically guide consistent UI across all the components created within the design document.
6. Improved Scalability
If a product is new and people are signing up, the system will likely need to be ready for growth (and scalability). Component-based development allows purpose-built elements to work together like puzzle pieces.
A component-based architecture extends the modular benefits of a web application to the front end of your project. This allows you and your team to stay up with demand while retaining an easy-to-read and maintainable piece of code.
To better understand component-based development, its functions, documentation, tools, and best practices, read the complete Guide to Component-Based Architecture here.
