Micro Frontends – SICK’s contribution in the field of open source

With the open-source library Collage, the global tech and market leader in sensor intelligence is providing a solution for integrating and orchestrating micro frontends in web-based visualizations.

Who is SICK?

SICK develops smart sensor solutions to make industries fit for the digital transformation. With our individual, data-based complete solutions, we help companies to combine the operative level with the IT level, as well as utilize – and expand – the opportunities of IoT in industrial environments.

What’s meant by open source?

By definition, open source is free software. The source code of open-source software is freely accessible online. It can be viewed by anyone and, taking into account the open source license in use, it can be copied, used, changed and shared. At the same time, the open-source principle has led to a new form of collaboration via the internet – a global community of like-minded developers driven by a love of programming and the recognition of the community, working together as a team on open-source projects. This collaborative approach opens up new ways of developing apps and web pages, such as micro frontends.

What is SICK’s contribution in the field of open source?

In the case of micro frontends, websites or apps are comprised of separate features, rather than being one complex application. Unlike traditional monolithic architectures, microservices enable smaller, autonomous services to be constructed modularly and connected together via interfaces. In this way, micro frontend architectures adapt service-based backend architectures into the frontend.
 
In a micro frontend architecture, a user interface can be split into several small, technically-driven applications. This allows multiple interdisciplinary teams to work together on one app, for example. Each team is able to build their component with various frameworks and tools, even in the frontend, and use existing micro frontends in their browser, or develop new ones to re-use certain features in different applications. These components are then assembled into the final app.
 
With Collage, our team is placing a modern, user-friendly, framework-agnostic library at your disposal, one that allows you to connect your micro frontends to an application with ease. 

Use Collage for your own micro frontends projects and help to advance our library.

Click here to go to Collage on GitHub