PUBLICATION
Facilitating End-User Development of Websites with Micro-Frontends
Type
Conference Paper
Year
2024
Authors
Research Area
Web Engineering
Event
26th International Conference on Information Integration and Web Intelligence
Published in
Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Information Integration and Web Intelligence (iiWAS 2024)
Download
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.