Front-end service and small program container technology bring better organizational structure, maintainability and scalability to front-end applications. The application of these technologies will promote the innovation and development of front-end development, enabling the team to better deal with complex front-end requirements and business challenges. By treating the frontend as a service architecture, we can build more powerful, reliable and sustainable frontend applications.
Microservice architecture is a software architectural pattern for building complex applications. It splits a large monolithic application into a set of smaller, more independent services, each running in its own process and interacting through lightweight communication mechanisms. Each service is focused on addressing a specific business function or service and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.
Some of the key features of microservices architecture include: service splitting, independent deployment, lightweight communication, independent data management, elasticity and scalability, etc. Microservice architecture can bring many benefits, including higher development efficiency, better team collaboration, more flexible deployment and expansion, better fault tolerance, etc.
Microservice architecture is an architectural pattern generally used in the backend world to build backend services and applications. In a traditional three-tier architecture, the front-end usually acts as part of the user interface and communicates with the back-end services. Therefore, the front-end application itself does not directly participate in the design of the microservice architecture.
Front-end micro-service architecture design?
In front-end development, some concepts and technologies similar to microservice architecture can be adopted to improve the maintainability, scalability and flexibility of front-end applications. Here are some front-end design patterns and techniques related to microservices architecture:
- Single Responsibility Principle: Similar to the principle of service splitting in microservice architecture, front-end applications can split different functional modules into independent components, and each component is responsible for processing specific business logic. This componentized design can improve code maintainability and reusability.
- Micro-frontend: Micro-frontend is an architectural pattern that splits front-end applications into independent small applications, each of which has its own development team and technology stack, and can be independently developed, deployed, and expanded. Each micro-frontend application can be regarded as an independent front-end microservice, and the integration and collaboration between various micro-frontend applications can be realized through well-defined interfaces and communication mechanisms.
- Front-end service: Front-end applications can encapsulate some common business logic or functions into reusable front-end services, and interact through the communication mechanism between services. This service-oriented design can improve the modularity and scalability of front-end applications.
- API gateway: Similar to the API gateway in the microservice architecture, front-end applications can access back-end services and data through a unified portal, thereby providing better isolation and decoupling. An API gateway can be responsible for routing requests, authentication, authorization, and more to simplify communication between front-end applications and back-end services.
Although the front-end application itself does not have a microservice architecture, some principles and concepts of the microservice architecture can be used for reference, and the maintainability, scalability, and flexibility of the front-end application can be improved through appropriate design patterns and technologies.
Small program ecology is developing rapidly
Briefly talk about the mini-program ecology: Since the WeChat mini-program was officially launched in 2017, it has quickly become an important ecosystem in China's mobile Internet industry. As of the end of 2021, the monthly active users of WeChat Mini Programs have exceeded 120 million, covering various industry application scenarios such as e-commerce, finance, medical care, education, tourism, and travel. The WeChat mini-program ecosystem is also constantly improving, providing developers with a wealth of resources such as development tools, templates, and open source components.
Let’s talk about small program technology: Compared with traditional native application development technology, small program technology has the advantages of light weight, rapid development, cross-platform, no installation, and more user-friendly. Mini programs can be used without downloading and installing by users. At the same time, the development cost of mini programs is relatively lower, the development speed is faster, and it is easier to maintain and update. The applet technology also supports cross-platform operation and can run on multiple mobile devices at the same time, which greatly expands the coverage of applications and brings greater commercial value to enterprises and developers. Some of the more well-known small program container technology products on the market include: WeChat, Alipay, Baidu, Douyin small programs, etc., all of which are based on the technology base to improve the small program ecology of the big social platform, and can provide third parties for privatization deployment There are: FinClip, mPaaS and other products. It is understood that the small program container technology independently developed by FinClip can enable enterprises’ apps to have the ability to quickly run small programs, and their SDK can also be embedded in functional device terminals other than apps (such as Linux, Windows, MacOS, Kirin and other operating systems).
Small program container technology helps front-end service
The small program container technology can help the front-end service, so as to realize the modularization and scalability of the front-end application. Applet container technology provides a way to encapsulate front-end applications as independent applets, and interact with other applets or back-end services through the interface and communication mechanism provided by the container.
By using the applet container technology, the front-end application can be split into multiple independent applet modules, and each module is responsible for processing a specific business function or service. These applet modules can be developed, deployed and maintained independently, with relatively independent code and resources.
The core idea of front-end service is to encapsulate common business logic or functions into reusable front-end services, and interact through communication between services. In the applet container, each applet module can be regarded as a front-end service that provides specific functions or services. Different applet modules can communicate and cooperate through the interface and event mechanism provided by the container.
Through front-end service, the following benefits can be realized:
- Modular development: Front-end applications can be split into multiple independent small program modules, and each module focuses on specific functions or services. This modular development method improves code maintainability and reusability, enabling the development team to develop and test each module more independently.
- Independent deployment and expansion: Each applet module can be deployed independently without affecting other modules. This independence allows teams to roll out new features, fix bugs, or make upgrades more quickly without releasing the application as a whole.
- Loosely coupled communication: The applet container provides an interface and an event mechanism, which can realize loosely coupled communication between applet modules. Different applet modules can perform data transfer, state management and event triggering through the interfaces and events provided by the container, so as to realize collaborative work.
In modern front-end development, adopting front-end servitization and applet container technology can provide many benefits. By splitting the front-end application into independent small program modules and interacting through the interface and communication mechanism provided by the container, we can achieve modularization, independent deployment and expansion of the front-end application, and loosely coupled communication. Such a design can improve the maintainability, scalability and flexibility of the front-end application.
Front-end service and small program container technology enable different teams to independently develop and maintain their own front-end services, thereby improving development efficiency and team collaboration. At the same time, this architecture also helps to isolate and reuse business logic, making front-end applications more flexible and sustainable.
However, when adopting front-end servitization and applet container technology, there are trade-offs and proper design and implementation. Reasonable module splitting, clear interface design and effective communication mechanism are the keys to successfully realize front-end service