Introduction

You need to complete the first chapter before starting this new one. The first chapter installs the basics for the trading platform we are building. It also creates a modular toolkit that every recipe will be using.

This second chapter sets the product on an acceleration ramp. It will shape the whole chain of responsibilities and draft the big picture of the Microservice architecture. Once more, we will establish a necessary structure for the chapters to come, but on another level.

The User eXperience paradigm

For a couple of years now, we've assisted an amazingly active frontend revolution. Since the rise of HTML 5 and CSS3, with the common development platforms for mobile (iOS, Android, and so on), and with the amount of connected devices, so many doors and opportunities have been opened to the developer communities. The frequency of new JavaScript libraries popping-up in the open source field has made it quite difficult to follow.

But it's a revolution for good! It targets the customer and user experience. The customer nowadays wants to interact with a brand or a product from the desktop, laptop, TV, tablet, mobile, and soon the car. Network connection speeds vary as well from more than 150 megabytes per second to very few bytes per second. The customer can also expect offline features or at least a decent user experience. It's obvious that new challenges have come out of this complexity to improve the user experience.

As our reachability through different means has largely increased, our level of exposure to spam, direct solicitations, advertising, and marketing in general has never been higher. Interestingly, we are now far more sensitive and assertive to every single message that retains our attention online. As it takes us a fraction of second to decide whether something is worth it or not, we reject a poor design for the same reason. We are more demanding and saturated targets, and every brand has to follow the latest UX standards to make us interact with them.

Microservice architectures

We have seen already the massive benefits in terms of communication, image, and development that Internet organizations have generated by opening their APIs to the public (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and so on). Such radical changes in IT infrastructures are now becoming the norm for smaller companies and start-ups.

Modern architectures provide documented Public APIs and device-specific installation packages for their clients: mobile apps or responsive HTML contents delivered under specific shots. REST APIs are also a navigable dimension for more autonomous modules of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Maybe the main concern remains how to handle the load on the server side, but more computation is transferred to client devices and REST architectures are by definition stateless and consequently a good support for scalability.