Building Microservices, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. User Interfaces

So far, we haven’t really touched on the world of the user interface. A few of you out there might just be providing a cold, hard, clinical API to your customers, but many of us find ourselves wanting to create beautiful, functional user interfaces that will delight our customers. The user interface, after all, is where we’ll be pulling all these microservices together into something that makes sense to our customers.

When I first started computing, we were mostly talking about big, fat clients that ran on our desktops. I spent many hours with Motif and then Swing trying to make my software as nice to use as possible. Often these systems were just for the creation and manipulation of local files, but many of them had a server-side component. My first job at Thoughtworks involved creating a Swing-based electronic point-of-sale system that was just one of a large number of moving parts, most of which were on the server.

Then came the web. We instead started thinking of our UIs as being “thin,” with more logic on the server side. In the beginning, our server-side programs rendered the entire page and sent it to the client browser, which did very little. Any interactions were handled on the server side via GETs and POSTs triggered by the user clicking on links or filling in forms. Over time, JavaScript became a more popular option to add dynamic behavior to the browser-based UI, and some applications could arguably be as “fat” as the old desktop clients. ...