Everything you should know about module federation 2
Last month module federation announced their version 2 and this week I got to attend an in depth seminar by Zack Jackon at the MicroFrontEnds (MFEs) Conference 2024 on what exactly that means. So let’s break down the new advancements in the technology and how that’s going to shape your work with MFEs.
I’m a huge advocate for proper use of the power of types in code and one of my biggest pain points with microservices architecture and MFEs is the loss of typing certainty and while shared libraries can help avoid maintaining code in multiple places they still feel like an outdated approach sometimes. MF2 introduces remote type hints which dynamically pull in types from the remote modules and allow you to have the same type analysis experience you normally get with local modules. No additional plugins, just built in hot reloading of types. Making your workflow dramatically more streamlined — no more hunting around in files for the right type definition.
Understanding how code is imported from different modules can be a tricky thing to understand when joining an existing project but the new chrome dev tools plugin looks to be an absolute game changer. Easily visualise what’s being imported from each remote, see how the dependency graph builds out and see the shared modules at a glance. For onboarding new developers and understanding exactly how a complex network of micro front ends works together this will be such a huge quality of life feature.
Hot reload is one of the things that makes working with React a joy and makes the development iteration cycle super fast, but in the past that hasn’t quite translated to federated react modules. Now hot module reloading lets you work on projects transparently as if they weren’t even federated.
In his talk Zack also alludes to how you can do this against production, testing out local changes against a live environment without impacting any other developer! Module proxy lets you intercept the module that’s imported in much the same way you would intercept an HTTP request with Postman which has fascinating implications for testing out the fix for a bug in situ.
Be sure to check out all the latest changes on the module federation website and try the new features out for yourself!
