Here's why your frontend is difficult to scale: System Design for Frontend Development
An understanding to frontend systems
Your frontend is difficult to scale because UI components perform transaction instead of representing the outcome of a transaction.
In frontend development, the word transaction is often borrowed from backend or database terminology, where it means a unit of work that changes state. But in UI architecture, that definition is too broad to be useful.
A frontend transaction is any action that does not directly represent a user expectation, but instead exists to decide, coordinate, or derive what the user should see next.
A user expectation is something the user can reasonably perceive or predict from the interface:
“I see a loading state”
“I see an error message”
“I see a logged-in dashboard”
“This button is disabled”
“This modal is open”
A transaction is anything that exists to compute, decide, or orchestrate those outcomes:
Conditional branching
Flow control
State derivation
Coordination of multiple states
Imperative decision-making
A scalable UI is not one that “does things.”
It is one that asks for things to be done and renders what happened.
Your UI should not be responsible for changing the state of an object or data. A UI should only emit events and represent the outcome of those events. Events are transmitter they don’t perform transaction.
Your frontend becomes difficult to scale when the UI begin to more than presentation. And this is why state management libraries exist, to enforce abstracting transaction and presentation.
😀Be the First to grab a copy and start building systems👌 – FORM
To be continued…