Manfred Steyer on SPA-Based Micro Apps

03-07-2018 Antonio Goncalves 0 all

Hi Manfred, tell us who you are and what lead you into microservices?

I’m building web-based business software since the late 90s and nowadays my focus is on Angular. I’m following it close since its first days and I’m helping my customers with Angular workshops and consultancy on a regular basis since it went BETA. As they are building huge software systems that need to be maintained for 10+ years, they have a need for extensible and maintainable architectures. Hence, microservices are a potential architecture candidate all the time.

What will you be talking about at Voxxed Days Microservices?

I’ll talk about Micro Apps and Single Page Applications. Currently, this is one of my main topics. I’m discussing a lot with my customers, how the idea behind microservices fits into the world of modern web frontends. For this, I will present several solutions and I will also show some details regarding the implementation. Each possibility comes with advantages and disadvantages and we will discuss them. At the end, I’m presenting a model I created after a lot of discussions with different customers. It can help you to find the right solution for implementing Micro Apps in your project.

Distributed systems being decades old, we roughly know how to split and distribute microservices today. But for the front-end it’s new and very challenging. Aren’t we in a situation today of having fine grain microservices in the back and big ball of mud in the front?

This is a good question! What I see is that many people want to apply the idea of microservices in the frontend too. They learned that they need something like this for huge evolving software systems that need to be maintained for a decade or more. However, most mainstream frameworks for the frontend are not build with this idea in mind. This does not mean, that Micro Apps cannot be built with them, but it means that we have to think outside the box and come up with additional ideas which are not in the manual of those frameworks.