Effective Reuse on Frontend

In my previous post I discussed cost of reuse and some strategies how to deal with it on the backend. What about frontend? In terms of reuse both are very similar to each other. When we have more than just a few teams regularly contributing to frontend we need to start thinking how we approach reuse across different contexts/teams.

Exposing some API of our microservice to other teams makes it a published interface. Once this is done we cannot change it that easily anymore. Same happens on frontend when a team decides to “publish” some frontend component to be reused by other teams. The API (as well as the look) of this component becomes part of the contract exposed to the outside world.

Hence I believe that:

We should split web frontend into smaller pieces — microapps — much the same way as we split backend into microservices. Development and deployment of these microapps should be as independent of each other as possible.

This aligns quite well with the ideas of Martin Fowler, James Lewis and Udi Dahan who suggest that “microservice” is not a backed only concept. Instead of process boundaries it should be defined by business capabilities and include its own UI if necessary.

Similarly to microservices we want to promote reuse within each microapp while we want to be careful with reuse across different microapps/teams.

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Originally published at https://tech.transferwise.com on January 4, 2017.