Micro Frontends in Action: how it started?

[Mario Salvador Ruiz Font]

I love the idea behind your book, I really believe the world needs more a way to work together rather than being isolated.
So I believe the core foundation of having fun programming web apps and not being limited to use any technology is a great principle.
The web itself is amazing as its foundations is the openess and help humanity on his most complicated activity, the communication.

I would love to hear more on how this started and what was your initial steps to achieve what today conforms the content of the book?

[Michael Geers]

Thanks. I totally agree that many of the micro frontends paradigms are in line with the core principals that contributed to the success of the open web.

I've been a developer in the e-commerce space for over a decade now. The first companies we worked with had rather small development teams of 5 to 10 people. As the companies grew and their online share increased we had a similar effect in multiple project teams: We reached the limit of a single team size. In 2014 we had the chance to build a new e-commerce platform for a German department store chain [1] with the goal to architect the software in a way that enables multiple end-to-end teams working side-by-side with as little inter-team coupling as possible. We opted for a Self-Contained Systems [2] approach and were able to produce quick and high quality results. We had teams staffed with developers from different companies working on this project. The SCS definition was very helpful, but it focuses on the backend architecture. We had to figure out a lot of user interface integration mechanisms and best practices by ourself. In upcoming projects we had the ability to refine and iterate our approaches and techniques. The prior work of the OTTO Group [3] and publications from Gustaf Nilsson Kotte [4] were very helpful in this phase. These focus primarily on server-generated markup. With the rise of frontend frameworks like React we also felt the need to come up with a good solution for client-rendered applications. The results of our experimentations and research is documented here [5].

Hope this gives you a rough idea on where I'm coming from and how the topic has evolved for me over time. Feel free to ask more questions. I'm happy to go more into detail on this topic.

[1] https://noti.st/naltatis/zQb2m5/micro-frontends-the-nitty-gritty-details-or-frontend-backend-happyend#s3CHfXF
[2] https://scs-architecture.org
[3] https://www.otto.de/jobs/technology/techblog/artikel/scaling-with-microservices-and-vertical-decomposition_2014-07-29.php
[4] https://gustafnk.github.io/microservice-websites/
[5] https://micro-frontends.org