While microservice architecture has become extremely common, its use in the UI layer is still somewhat rare and difficult. Building microservices in the UI layer (sometimes called Micro Frontends) requires well-thought-out support frameworks that allow for collaboration between loosely coupled and independently deployable components. Well it turns out that the Eclipse Platform developers have been innovating and fine-tuning such frameworks for the last 20 years, and in this session we'll explore what they have to teach us.
This session will first examine how Eclipse RCP and its underlying frameworks match up extremely well to the requirements of microservice development in the UI layer. From a technical point of view an extensible workbench, adapters, contexts, an expression framework, and a built-in event bus give us much of what we need to create and manage collections of independent UI components. In addition, I’ll show how to integrate REST services into an Eclipse RCP application using the ECF JAX-RS Jersey Client.
At a higher level, I’ll be describing some of the best-practices and patterns that have arisen as Eclipse developers have worked to maximize modularity in the UI. These practices and patterns are useful no matter what your preferred implementation technology is. Whether you are developing microservices in the UI layer or developing new frameworks that support modular user interfaces, the work done by Eclipse developers can serve as a very useful roadmap.