This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Chameera Dulanga
10 Essential Areas to Consider When Building a Scalable Frontend Application
Scalability is one of the core non-functional requirements in modern web applications. As developers, it is essential to ensure that both the application and the development processes are highly scalable to deliver the expected performance as the application grows.
However, scaling frontend applications has become a challenging task since there are many areas to consider. So, in this article, I will discuss the ten most important areas you need to consider to build scalable frontend applications quickly.
1. App Architecture
Application architecture is the most critical aspect when designing a new application. Traditionally, most organizations and developers tend to go with monolithic architecture since it simplifies the development, debugging, and testing processes by maintaining a single code base for the whole application.
Although the monolithic architecture seems fine at the earlier stages of the application, you will face significant challenges with the growth of the application. For example, with the monolithic architecture, you will have to maintain all the components and services in a single code base and use a single pipeline for builds and releases. As a result, it will take a significant amount of time to complete a release, even for a slight change in a single component. Similarly, you will find many more issues with monolithic architecture and scalability. Hence, it is advisable to avoid using monolithic architecture for modern applications.
Instead, you can use a more sophisticated approach like Microfrontends architecture to build scalable frontend applications. Microfrontends architecture allows you to break the code base into smaller pieces and maintain them separately. You can assign different development teams to each Microfrontend so that they can develop, build, test and release them independently. Compared to a monolithic architecture, this approach is much faster, and you can easily scale the application without having an impact on the application performance or development velocity.
Furthermore, you can use specialized tools and infrastructure like Bit to create a Microfrontend architecture for your application. Bit is a battle-tested infrastructure that large organizations like Dell, eBay, and Tesla use to make scalable frontend applications.
2. Infrastructure and Tooling
Choosing the proper infrastructure and tooling is another crucial step in building scalable frontend applications. You can easily automate most of your repetitive work with appropriate tools and save significant time for your core development tasks.
For example, consider code quality reviews. As we all know, performing code quality reviews is a time-consuming task. Although you can manually manage it up to some level, manually performing code quality reviews will become a barrier to the applications’ scalability at some point. But, if you use a tool like SonarCloud, you can easily automate the code review process and allow the application to scale without limitations.
Similarly, you can cover many other areas in your frontend architecture with specialized tools:
- Linting — Code formatters like Prettier allow you to format and maintain a single styling convention throughout the project within seconds.
- Bootstrapping — Automating the initial project structure creation and package installation.
- Component management- Components play a vital role in Microfrontend architecture. Hence, you need a proper component management mechanism to create, maintain and share components between Microfrontends. You can use a tool like Bit, which allows distributed component development with a modular architecture design, autonomous teams, decoupled codebases, and independent releases.
- Dependancy management — Automating dependency management is another crucial task since you can’t manually maintain hundreds of dependencies as the application grows, and manage dependencies across applications and teams. Bit is also a powerful tool to solve this.
- Deployments — Manually triggering deployments for a large number of Microfrontends is a time-consuming task. Instead, you can automatically trigger a deployment of your code on CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines.
3. Monorepo vs. Multi-Repo
Choosing between monorepo and multi-repo is another significant decision you must make when designing a frontend application. Both these approaches bring some unique features and challenges to your project architecture, and you need to analyze the pros and cons based on your requirements.
Monorepos
In the monorepo approach, you will have a single code base for all Microfrontends. This design makes sharing code between Microfrontends and collaboration among teams easier since all the development teams have access to the repository. In addition, you can maintain all the test suites, automation scripts, and infrastructure configurations in a single place. However, monorepos will make your deployment process more challenging and often cause conflicts in shared codes.
Multi-repos
Multi-repo approach is the opposite of the monorepos. In multi-repos, each component or project will have a separate repository. This design helps you manage access control separately for repositories and avoid multiple code conflicts between teams. However, code sharing in multi-repos will be more challenging than in monorepos.
Using the best of both worlds
As discussed above, both monorepo and multi-repo approaches have unique benefits, and choosing one will force you to compromise your project architecture in some way.
But, none of these pros and cons will matter if you use a tool like Bit, since it brings the best of monorepos and polyrepos into a single place. Bit solves the code-sharing issue by allowing developers to use any component in any application while individually tracking all the components. In addition, it automatically manages dependencies and provides separate built and test pipelines for each component.
Overall, Bit encourages code sharing and collaboration among developers while maintaining the independency of each component. Hence, this is one of the best approaches to building scalable frontend applications.
4. Tech Stack
Selecting a solid tech stack is another important step in building a scalable application. You should always think about the future of your application and select a tech stack that can effectively scale to the ever-changing needs of a client, or framework.
Here are some of the main characteristics of a scalable tech stack:
- Continuous updates.
- A solid roadmap for future versions.
- Community support.
- A good ecosystem with third-party libraries and tools.
- Good documentation.
Furthermore, it is advisable to use a standard tech stack across the organization since it allows developers to get familiar with all the projects in the organization quickly. Significantly, if you are using Micorfrontends, a standard tech stack will improve code sharing and collaboration among developers. However, there are situations where you have to go out of these boundaries. For example, if your project requires specific technologies, you might have to go against the organization and community norms to select a tech stack.
Apart from that, you must carefully pick each tech stack component since they should be well-compatible. Usually, a frontend tech stack mainly consists of the framework, language, style processor, testing, state management, lining, and build tools. Out of these components, developers often prioritize the framework or language when selecting a tech stack.
For example, a generic React-based tech stack will consist of the following technologies:
- React
- TypeScript
- Styled Components
- Jest
- Redux
- Prettier
- Webpack
5. Component Templates
Components are the primary building block of modern frontend applications. They increase the code reusability and allow developers to scale up the application with minimum effort. For example, if you are building an online selling platform like eBay, you can write a single component to display a product detail and use it throughout the project to list all the products.
However, you should maintain a consistent design in all the components to maintain compatibility. Hence, it is always good to use a component template generation mechanism rather than creating them manually.
For example, React, Angular, and Vue.js provide CLI support to generate component templates. If not, you can use a tool like Bit to create and maintain reusable templates for components with your best standards.
6. Cross-Project Dependencies
Code sharing is one of the most used concepts in modern frontend applications. Although we are moving towards Microfrontend architectures to build more scalable applications, developers still use code-sharing techniques to increase code reusability.
For example, there can be a situation where you need to use a component from another Microfrontend or a different application of your organization. So, another Microfrontend or a project can become a dependency of your Micorfrontend or project.
However, manually handling these dependencies can negatively impact the application’s scalability. Hence, it is advised to use a specialized tool like Bit to link dependencies easily. Bit automates the dependency management process and tracks packages and other dependencies to prevent issues like breaking versions.
7. Build and Test Process
Software testing ensures that the application is working as expected. Especially when we modify the code, we need to run tests before building and releasing the application to verify the behavior of the new code and its effect on other areas of the application.
Unit tests, E2E tests, and integration tests are some of the most common testing strategies used in frontend development. If your application is small, you can easily trigger these tests and build the application manually after a change. But, as the application scales, you need to automate this process to avoid bottlenecks.
For example, if you are using Microfrontends, you must maintain separate build and test pipelines for each Microfrontend. However, sometimes there can be hundreds of Micrfrontends, and manually monitoring each is not practical. In such situations, you can use tools like GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines to trigger test and build pipelines once a change is committed to the codebase.
Furthermore, tools like Bit provide independent build and test pipelines at the component level. It maintains a graph of all components and ensures that only the impacted components are built again. Automating the build and test processes at the component level will give you great flexibility to scale your frontend applications.
8. Backend Communications
Connectivity between the backend and front end is another critical aspect of frontend scalability. For example, performing too much processing on the frontend can cause performance and user experience issues as the application scales. So, we should always try to perform most of the computational work on the backend and bring data that will be used by the client, and nothing more.
In addition, you can use design patterns like BFF to move frontend logic to an intermediate layer. With the BFF pattern, you can significantly reduce the frontend workload without depending on the backend. The new intermediate layer will contact backend services, perform calculations, and send the formatted results to the frontend. Thus, you can scale up your frontend without worrying about performance.
9. Styling
Styling is an essential part of frontend development. Styling allows developers to add a unique flavor to the application while improving its presentation. However, maintaining consistent styling throughout the application can be a challenging task when the application starts to scale.
For example, suppose you scale the application from 10 to 100 components. In that case, you need to maintain the same colors, fonts, margins, borders, and all the other styles in newly created components to maintain consistency. As you can imagine, this is a time-consuming, error-prone process.
As a result, component-based theming and decoupling logic and styles became popular among developers. These techniques allow you to create components with the same styles and reuse them in your projects by only updating the business logic.
Furthermore, you can use tools like Bit to create more sophisticated themes using components. You can find more on building a component-based theming with Bit and React in the video below.
10. Developer Collaborations
Collaboration among developers is another central area we need to consider when developing scalable applications. There should be good coordination among developers to avoid repetitive work and improve productivity among the team. If your development team is well-synced, you can easily introduce new features and scale the application without delays in the development process.
However, we often face scenarios where multiple developers have to work on the same area or component of the application. In such situations, developers should have a good understanding of what others do to avoid unnecessary conflicts. You can use version-controlling techniques to sync codebases and handle code-level conflicts easily.
However, you can take the developer collaboration to another level using tools like Bit and Storybook. Bit allows you to create a collaborative scope where your team members can import, export, share and modify components. In addition, Bit will enable you to review and compare the changes made to the component before accepting them.
Final Thoughts
In this article, I have discussed ten essential areas to consider when developing a scalable frontend application. However, the scalability of a frontend application is not limited to these ten areas. You can always explore new possibilities and discover new things like Bit that might improve the scalability of your application.
I hope my suggestions will help you build a scalable frontend application. Thank you for reading.
Scaling Frontend Applications in 2023 was originally published in Bits and Pieces on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Chameera Dulanga
Chameera Dulanga | Sciencx (2023-01-03T09:30:42+00:00) Scaling Frontend Applications in 2023. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2023/01/03/scaling-frontend-applications-in-2023/
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