Chessboard - A MicroFrontend Framework for React

Chessboard is complete, no-compromise MicroFrontend Framework for React.

Using Chessboard, you will be able to develop your own micro-frontends (called "Pieces"), complete with resource importation, css loaders and modules, and all other frontend goodies.

A Chessboard Piece is a working application in itself, but it can be integrated into a broader application called a "Board": a master application on which the various Pieces will be layed.

Chessboard supports both Client Side Rendering and Server Side Rendering, for SPA or static sites alike.

Terminology

Piece

A Piece is a micro-application developed in React, which can be loaded inside a master application as a micro-frontend.

Pieces must be packaged using NWB, and more precisely using the @chessboard/nwb-config configuration generator. This allows Chessboard to inject any configuration it requires so that the Piece is able to run flawlessly in all environment: dev/prod, standalone/injected, csr/ssr...

Board

A Board is an application that will be using Chessboard Pieces. Chessboard has no pre-conception regarding Boards, except that they must be using React. A NWB app can be a board, but so can a CRA app or a Gatsby site.

Square

A Square is a placeholder for a Piece. Squares are layed on Boards using the ChessboardSquare component from the @chessboard/client package. At runtime, the referenced Piece will be loaded and displayed in place of the Square.

It is also possible to inject Pieces at build-time through the static-injection tool, or at fetch-time through the Pieces proxy.

Static Injection/Pieces Proxy

The Pieces Proxy sits between a CDN and the client, and any HTML file passed through it will see its Pieces placeholder populated by a Server-Side-Rendered version of the component.

The Static Injection tool acts just like the Pieces Proxy, but acts on file at build time, patching any HTML file found in a given path.

Those tools are developed by the ARA Framework project, which Chessboard is inspired by and compatible with.

Demonstration

This package provides a full demonstration of Chessboard in action. The demonstration is composed of three parts:

• Two Pieces, called FirstPiece and SecondPiece, which source can be found in the demo/pieces folder.
• One Board, built with create-react-app, which loads our two Pieces in a single application.

Running the demo

Pre-required

Install all dependency, using the mixt mono-repo manager:

npm ci
npx mixt ci
npx mixt build
npm run demo:install

Development mode

In order to run the demo in development mode, we need to launch both pieces and the board.

The root package.json contains all the scripts necessary for launching the demo.

npm run dev:piece:first     # launch the first Piece in dev mode

npm run dev:piece:second    # launch the second Piece in dev mode

npm run dev:board:cra       # launch the Board

Run each command in a separate terminal. The last one should automatically open your browser, where you can see the stitched application.

Edit any of the Pieces in demo/pieces to see your changes reflected in real-time with hot-reload, directly in the Board application!

You can also edit the Board in demo/board/create-react-app.

Note: this Readme uses the Create React App-based Board, but you can also play around with another Board (Gatsby, NextJs or NWB), by changing :cra accordingly (:gatsby, :nextjs, :nwb)

Production mode

Likely, the demo can be built to run in production mode.

First, run the build scripts:

npm run build:piece:first     # build the first Piece for production

npm run build:piece:second    # build the second Piece for production

npm run build:board:cra       # build the Board

Then, launch the serve commands:

npm run serve:piece:first     # serve the first Piece

npm run serve:piece:second    # serve the second Piece

npm run serve:board:cra       # serve the Board

Finally, open-up your browser to http://localhost:3000 to see the production site.

Acknowledgments

A lot of ideas for the Chessboard framework have been inspired by the ARA Framework.

If you don't need HMR and other frontends goodies out of the box, and if you're not afraid of handling your own webpack configs manually, check them out!

ARA Framework has the benefit of offering bindings for other frontend such as Vue.js or Angular, while Chessboard focuses on React.