Ever since we started breaking applications into services, be it in the era of SOA or more recently with microservices, we’ve struggled to incorporate user interfaces into our decoupled, distributed architectures. We’ve seen frontends versioned separately with tight coupling to our services, breaking cohesion. We’ve seen the rise of Backend-For-Frontend and the emerge of micro frontends. We talk about composition, yet so many projects fail to implement actual composition. Instead we end up with some kind of compromise, with repeated business logic in the front-end, back-end and API, making it hard to scale – especially when multiple teams are involved – causing lock-step deployment, latency, bottlenecks and coordination issues.

What if we could find a viable solution that allowed us to scale development, keep distribution and cohesion and also provide composition of user interfaces?

In this talk you are introduced to the evolution of compositional user interfaces and existing patterns while we discover their pros and cons, before diving into the architecture and development of compositional interfaces using hypermedia and micro-frontends. We go beyond the simple “Hello World” example that always seems to work, and you’ll learn patterns in modelling and design that will get you up and running with decoupled, composed user interfaces in your day job.