Facilitating End-User Development of Websites with Micro-Frontends

Jan-Ingo Haas, Sheeba Samuel, Martin Gaedke

Abstract: Micro-Frontends have recently been introduced and studied as a way to break up the monolithic structure of traditional user interfaces into more modular and encapsulated components. Current research on this topic focuses on case studies assessing the feasibility of a Micro-Frontend-based architecture for websites of varying sizes. While important, other use cases that originate from the modular and composable nature of Micro-Frontends are often overlooked. We introduce a novel approach to front-end construction with Micro-Frontends working towards the goal of enabling End-Users with limited knowledge or skill in web design to create consistent-looking websites that additionally adhere to corporate guidelines. We leverage Web Components as our implementation of Micro-Frontends and demonstrate how the interaction point between End-User Developer and Web Component can be defined so that reusable components can be devised that are seamlessly integrated into websites by End-Users. We avoid a lock-in to a specific framework or programming language by only utilizing standardized web technologies. Our approach is actively used in an academic environment, showing that the realization of our idea was successful.