Frontend development is increasingly complex, moving beyond simple display logic to manage intricate state, handle dynamic data fetching, and coordinate user interactions across many screens. While organizing code by feature or visual component is common, a more robust approach involves thinking in distinct layers or concerns.
By separating your codebase into well-defined layers, you create a structure that is far easier to understand, maintain, and scale. Instead of a single component attempting to handle fetching data, managing its own complex state, applying intricate rendering logic, and also managing presentation, these responsibilities can be distributed.
Key layers to consider might include:
- State Management Layer: Handling global application state, local component state, and potentially URL state synchronization.
- Data Fetching Layer: Managing API calls, caching, mutations, and data normalization. This layer abstracts away the details of how data is obtained.
- Business Logic/Service Layer: Containing application-specific operations that might involve coordinating actions across different parts of the app.
- Rendering Logic Layer: Components or modules specifically responsible for conditional rendering, mapping lists, and other display-specific logic based on data provided.
- Presentation/UI Layer: Pure, dumb components focused solely on how things look based on props they receive. They have no internal state or side effects related to data fetching or business logic.
- Routing Layer: Managing navigation within the application.
This separation of concerns drastically improves testability, as each layer can be tested in isolation. It enhances maintainability by reducing coupling – changes in one layer (like switching a state management library or a data fetching method) have minimal impact on others. Furthermore, it boosts scalability, making it simpler for larger teams to work on different parts of the application concurrently without stepping on each other’s toes. Shifting focus to these architectural layers provides a powerful mental model for building robust and long-lasting frontend applications.
Source: https://itnext.io/how-to-think-in-frontend-layers-not-just-features-1d2bdc8b9287?source=rss—-5b301f10ddcd—4
