single-spa VS Bit

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/

As part of my job, recently I'm working on integrating Vite (also Vitest) into a dev tool called Bit, which originally uses webpack in most of the cases. Basically, Bit is a component-driven development tool for various frontend frameworks and Node.js. In Bit, everything is a component and eventually consumed as an npm package. So technically, you would deal with all kinds of components as packages in your node_modules folder, whatever they are in CJS or ESM, need to be further transformed or not.

Using Bit and Bit Platform, components are shared and synced across separate repositories, allowing you to treat your poly-repo setup as one single virtual monorepo.

Before Bit became part of our workflow, sharing and collaborating on individual components felt like climbing a steep mountain. Managing dependencies, packaging, documentation, and setting up elaborate build tools wasn’t just time-consuming — it was frustrating. These setups often relied on third-party tools that were prone to issues, introducing bugs and bottlenecks along the way.

Bit Documentation

By leveraging tools like Bit and [Ripple CI], developers can unlock the full potential of build-time micro frontends, creating applications that are not only modular and maintainable but also efficient and cohesive. It’s time to give build-time integration the spotlight it deserves and embrace a future where distributed frontends are both powerful and user-friendly.

Bit. Composable software.

Some component collections like shadcn/ui offer a CLI tool to help you with the “copy-paste” process. Other tools like Bit can help you do the same with any UI library hosted on the Bit Platform. Any component can either be installed or copied into your project.

Bit has introduced a new entity to the world of web development: The Bit Component. In short, a Bit component can be thought of as a super-package. You can share it, install it, copy it, and even collaborate on it independently of any particular project setup.

Official Website