JS Kongress 2019 - Revolution of Architectures

Takeaways from a great Javascript and Frontend conference in Munich

This is one of the conferences that I try to attend every year because it is organized by the local community and attracts also great many international developers and speakers.

I am really happy that we are getting more and more interesting conferences here -> I am looking at you @btconf and JSCraftCamp ... only to mention the first two that popped in my mind.

But back to JSKongress 2019:

There were many good talks and presentations and an exceptionally interesting deep track (open space / bof) with e.g. the maintainers of #webpack and #rollup.

I could spend the whole day talking about the many interesting topics, but I wanted to pick out the two that did not let me stop thinking and led to the beginnings of my current endeavour of a Github project for a Microfrontend Architecture Solution, but more about that later..

Talk 01: Independent deployment of the frontend with Docker and Kubernetes

by @monicalent

She talked about the benefits and complications of independently maintaining and deploying parts of a frontend and showcased a solution that integrated with Docker and Kubernetes. This is a nice way of solving the CI and DevOps part of the whole Microfrontend idea.

Talk 02: Angular, React, Vue and Co. – peacefully united thanks to Web Components and Micro Apps

by @ManfredSteyer

He talked about decomposing a big solution into small self-contained parts that can be maintained by different teams and that way microservices in the backend have their siblings in the frontend with micro apps...

Hopefully the slides and video recording of the conference are soon online, so you can also participate after the fact

Interesting - I want to know more.....

One of the resources that describes the concept very well is the site https://micro-frontends.org/ and I compiled a list of youtube videos of different speakers that talk about their experiences in actually implementing such a solution and what challenges and pitfalls they faced: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1qIp0pQfjQ1q_Hb42IBvVQNt0WVrZXrG

As I mentioned in the beginning, I started developing a Proof Of Concept and a library that can be used to orchestrate a microfrontend solution with a little help of GraphQL as the common language to let the parts in the loosely coupled frontend and backend communicate and also share state if needed.

Disclaimer: it is in the very early stages and under heavy development, but I wanted to give other people the chance to discuss and contribute early on. Look for yourself: https://github.com/microfront/microfront

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