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Combining the Best of Two Worlds: Microservices and Micro Frontends as Basis for a New Plugin Architecture

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Service-Oriented Computing (SummerSOC 2022)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1603))

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Abstract

Plugins can be used to extend applications with new functionality without requiring expensive code changes for the application. To enable users to interact with the new functionality, plugins must be able to contribute new elements to the user interface of the application. However, as plugins are built for specific applications, they are not reusable in other applications. Microservices on the other hand are built with reusability in mind: Applications can invoke microservices to utilize their functionality. However, a developer has to write code and create the corresponding UI for the application to interact with the microservice. To address the shortcomings of both plugins and microservices, we propose a reference architecture that blends concepts of plugins and microservices to allow microservices to provide code and user interfaces to existing applications. Our reference architecture allows the creation of microservices that can be used as plugins and as usual microservices at the same time. To demonstrate the practical feasibility, we also present a prototypical implementation of the architecture and evaluate the approach for a specific use-case.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/quantum/overview-what-is-qsharp-and-qdk.

  2. 2.

    https://qiskit.github.io/openqasm.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/quil-lang/quil.

  4. 4.

    https://silq.ethz.ch.

  5. 5.

    https://ballerina.io.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/UST-QuAntiL.

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Acknowledgements

The work was partially funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action project PlanQK (01MK20005N).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Stuttgart, Institute of Architecture of Application Systems, Universitätsstraße 38, 70569, Stuttgart, Germany

    Fabian Bühler, Johanna Barzen, Lukas Harzenetter, Frank Leymann & Philipp Wundrack

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Correspondence to Fabian Bühler .

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  1. University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Johanna Barzen

  2. University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Frank Leymann

  3. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Schahram Dustdar

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Bühler, F., Barzen, J., Harzenetter, L., Leymann, F., Wundrack, P. (2022). Combining the Best of Two Worlds: Microservices and Micro Frontends as Basis for a New Plugin Architecture. In: Barzen, J., Leymann, F., Dustdar, S. (eds) Service-Oriented Computing. SummerSOC 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1603. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18304-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18304-1_1

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