Leveraging the BFF Pattern

Improve your UI development with the Backend-for-Frontend pattern.

Introduction

he Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) pattern has become increasingly popular in modern web development, offering numerous benefits to developers and improving user experiences. This article will guide you through implementing the BFF pattern in a UI project with TypeScript, complete with sample code .

Understanding the BFF Pattern

The Backend-for-Frontend pattern refers to a backend service tailored specifically for a particular frontend application. This custom backend serves as a mediator between the frontend and other backend services, such as databases and microservices. The BFF pattern simplifies frontend code by offloading complex data processing and business logic to the backend, leading to improved code quality, maintainability, and scalability.

Benefits of the BFF Pattern

1. Tailored Experience: The BFF pattern allows you to create a customised experience for each frontend, ensuring that they receive only the data they need.
2. Simplified Frontend Code: By handling data processing and aggregation at the BFF level, frontend code becomes cleaner and easier to maintain.
3. Better Performance: Since the BFF only sends relevant data to the frontend, the payload size is reduced, leading to faster loading times and improved performance.
4. Enhanced Collaboration: The BFF pattern promotes better collaboration between frontend and backend teams, as they can work on their respective BFFs without affecting each other.

Setting up a TypeScript Project

To start implementing the BFF pattern in a UI project with TypeScript, you need to first create a new project. Install the necessary dependencies, such as React, ReactDOM, and TypeScript, and set up your project structure.

# Create a new project
npx create-react-app my-bff-ui --template typescript
cd my-bff-ui

Implementing the BFF Pattern

Install the necessary dependencies:

npm install express cors

Create a file named server.ts in the root folder of your project and import the required dependencies:

import express from 'express';
import cors from 'cors';

Create an instance of the Express app and enable CORS:

const app = express();
app.use(cors());

Define your API routes and handlers:

app.get('/api/data', async (req, res) => {
  // Fetch data from other backend services, databases, or microservices
  const data = await fetchData();
  res.json(data);
});

Start the Express server:

const PORT = process.env.PORT || 3001;
app.listen(PORT, () => {
  console.log(`Server is running on port ${PORT}`);
});

Connecting the Frontend with the BFF :

Now that your BFF is set up, you can modify your frontend to send requests to the BFF service instead of directly accessing backend services.

Create a file named api.ts in the src folder to handle API calls:

export async function fetchData() {
  const response = await fetch('/api/data');
  const data = await response.json();
  return data;
}

Modify your frontend component to use the fetchData function:

import React, { useEffect, useState } from 'react';
import { fetchData } from './api';

function App() {
  const [data, setData] = useState(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    async function getData() {
      const fetchedData = await fetchData();
      setData(fetchedData);
    }
    getData();
  }, []);

  return (
    <div>
      {/* Render your data */}
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

Conclusion:

The Backend-for-Frontend pattern is a powerful technique that can improve performance and maintainability considerably.