What is old is new again

What is old is new again

This post about “front-end microservices” appeared on hacker news.

This is the original “portal” idea that was used back in the 1996-2000 days of Yahoo.
I have used this technique at companies that need to present an “integrated” view.

For example, an internal HR web site that presents a single page of all things related to an employee benefits. The information would come from multiple different services:

• ADP for payroll
• Fidelity for 401k
• An internal vacation tracker
• etc

Each service would be given their own iframe that they control. No needs to worry about anything outside the iframe.

This is a time-proven way to do an integrated presentation of independent systems.
To clean up the look and feel – use basic html transformations and inject the site css.
It may seem “hacky” – but it works well in many, many real world circumstances.