A Demo project exploring options of dynamic loading of micro-frontends on the shell

yarn install

yarn run start

Open browser to

http://localhost:3001/workspaces

this will currently only run in dev mode on webpack-dev-server.

Production bundling could be added later on, by deploying prod builds into private CDN locations (AWS S3 buckets)

Each app is implemented in a monorepo, along with shell as the host

Shell has import-map module reference to each app bundle

Each app is hosted on a sub path (/app1, /app2) using react-router-dom

Each app is lazy loaded when specific route to that app is called, apps depend on Shell libraries

Webpack-dev-server compiles each app as SystemJS libraries and starts webservers on different ports to host app bundles

• Lerna / Yarn workspaces
• Webpack 5 Module Federation with Remote component loader - feat/fed-modules-remote-component
• SystemJS-SingleSPA - feat/systemjs-modules-singlespa

Is the present and the future. Most browsers natively support loading ESM modules nowadays. This below works in a browser console.

const React = await import('https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@esm-bundle/react/esm/react.production.min.js');

However, most libraries are not published in ESM modules format, lodash, react ...

Webpack takes care of CommonJS format to make it work with import /export syntax in browsers.

Webpack 5 may provide bundling in ESM format soon

On every module you'd have to pass the absolute path of Import CDN Url 😠

ESM native importmap feature could solve this at the top of the home page

<script type="importmap">

  imports: {
    vue: "https://unpkg.com ... /vue.esm.browser.min.js"
    react: "https:// ..."
    lodash:"..."
  }

</script>

Not all browsers support importmaps though. 😕

So comes SystemJS to the rescue

Watch this for justification of SystemJS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmdKF2UhFzw

The way to configure in webpack

  output: {
    filename: 'shell-bundle.js',
    libraryTarget: 'system',
  },

You can use

• redux
• react-redux
• svelte-redux-connect

libraries to utilise a shared state management in the shell