angular-microfrontend VS single-spa

You can find the source code that we are going to use in this repo

Micro-frontend has always aroused my curiosity: I wanted to understand how they work, how to build them, what their pros and cons are. In 2018, inspired by this topic, I tried to build something similar to single-spa in one of the pet projects. At that time, there was no Webpack Module Federation (WMF), and Webpack itself seemed inconvenient. The choice fell on ESBuild and importmap. Browser support for importmap at the time was mostly on paper or with special flags in browsers. For this reason, I used a polyfill. But, surprisingly, everything worked and even in several projects.

We will cover some of the popular frameworks and libraries available, and guide you through setting up a microfrontend architecture using Single-Spa.

In the next article, we will explore the tools and technologies for building microfrontends, including a step-by-step guide to setting up a microfrontend architecture using Single-Spa.

Official Website

At JupiterOne, we've made a significant transition from a monolithic frontend to a distributed frontend architecture using microfrontends, powered by (single-spa-react)[https://single-spa.js.org/]. This architectural shift has brought many benefits, such as lazy loading sections of the app and accelerating our development cycle. However, like any significant change, it has also come with its set of challenges.

Single-SPA Framework - One of the most popular choices. It has a large community behind it and offers robust routing and lifecycle management for microapps. Ref - https://single-spa.js.org/

Joel Denning is the visionary behind single-spa, boasting profound insights into the true mechanics of the web and is, in my view, a pioneer in micro frontend architecture. I highly recommend checking the single-spa website and his YouTube channel. While the videos might appear dated at first glance, rest assured, Joel is ahead of his time, and the content remains incredibly relevant today.

You got me curious and I found that single spa is something new to me - if I read https://github.com/single-spa/single-spa then I reckon you can use Svelte(Kit) in such framework - like you can use angular etc

I’ve actually done that “web components as the interoperability layer”!

It was this old angular 1.8 app with new features being written in angular-hybrid-ized angular 8. Ripping out angular-hybrid and separating the angular 1.8 routes from the modern angular routes was difficult, but now they were totally separate.

The only thing linking them together was an object with some RXJS streams in it for state, and a little in-house wrapper “app” who just loaded one component or another depending on the URL and a hash of routes for config. (I’d probably use SingleSPA [1] now. Same thing really.)

We could deploy them separately since the build just ends up being another JS file somewhere that just gets included with a script tag at runtime. No version bumping! No big mega build!

We started replacing the remaining “old” routes 1 by 1 with a “new” counter part. That was the easiest part, and went at a pace devs were comfortable with (fast enough) and business folk could tolerate. (modular enough to not HAVE to be done all at once)

Last I checked, the angular 1.8 stuff is gone years ago. :)

[1] https://single-spa.js.org/