Front end Development Trends That You Must Consider for Developing Scalable User Interfaces

Atomic design is the theory inspired by Chemistry and proposed by Brad Frost, which correlates components of the web application with the composition of atoms. Just like any matter, Atom combine to form molecules which combine to form complex organisms; Atomic design is based on concept of breaking website components into basic elements and then working with them to build the website. It is an approach to create design system with simpler elements and consists of 5 different levels, which are:

• Atoms

Any matter is made up of atoms, it is elementary unit of everything. Just like that, web interfaces are made up of HTML tags, buttons, colour pallets, animations and other similar abstract elements.

• Molecules

Molecules are group of atoms which are bonded together. So in design system, these molecules with their own characteristics and functions serve as the backbone of the design system.

• Organisms

Molecules provide the building blocks, which combine together to form organisms. Organism consists of components like primary navigation, forms, social media integration, logo etc. These are relatively complex and form various sections of the user interface.

• Templates

At this stage, the atom-molecule-organism analogy is broken and gets into terms which are more related to front end development and this is the state where clients start seeing their designs in place.

• Pages

Pages are formed by putting together number of templates and dummy content is replaced by actual content to provide accurate illustration of user experience. This is where things start to look like the proposed page layouts.    Atomic design presents itself with clear approach for crafting complex and scalable user interfaces. Some of the benefits of Atomic Design are:

• Easy to understand layout
• Consistent code
• Easier to update, remove and add new sections
• Rapid prototyping with reusable elements

Intuitive front end development is difficult; and high scale, complex front end development where multiple teams working together is even more troublesome. Breaking the front end development into more manageable tasks turns out to be more effective and efficient.

Micro front end is pattern of developing web application user interfaces or front ends which is basically a compilation of semi-independent fragments developed in different technologies by different teams, the independent teams are cross functional and comprehensively build features from user interface to database. This facilitates the development of robust and feature rich web application.

Micro frontend allows same amount of flexibility and speed that backend team gets from micro services.

Here are some of the benefits of Micro Frontends:

• Upgradation – User Interface improvement becomes easier
• Facilitates continuous deployment
• Simplifies the whole testing process
• Rapid Development and deployment
• Higher agility
• Smaller and manageable codes
• Scalable and efficient architecture for remote or separated teams

Encapsulation is an important aspect of the web components which is basically ability to keep markup styles, markup structure etc. hidden from other code so that there is no conflict between different parts and along with ability to maintain clean code. Shadow DOM API is the key to link masked DOM to an element. Document object model or commonly known as ‘DOM’ facilitates the hidden DOM trees to be linked to the elements of regular DOM trees.

In layman’s language, you can comprehend Shadow DOM as DOM within a DOM. It is a DOM tree which with its own elements and styles is isolated from initial DOM.

Shadow DOM is not the recent thing and browsers have been using it for a very long time to encapsulate the inner structure. It is perfectly compatible with all web components, it can be linked to every available element and is supported by every browser.

Shadow DOM gives prowess to developer to create components that can embedded in any web page without fearing about the fact that styling might bleed into other webpages. It is also recognised as the prominent solution to true encapsulation of styles for web components.

In our next article, We will be covering remaining front end development methodologies that are useful in building intuitive user interfaces. To learn more about these concepts, why they are useful, where they are useful; you can get in touch with one of our senior consultant.