Foundations of a Frontend Platform - Dependency Management

A Frontend Platform offers a curated set of Frameworks, Libraries and Tools for Frontend Developers to use, and makes sure these dependencies are always up to date through Centralized Lifecycle Management.

You don't want some old React App, or AngularJS SPA to be lying around somewhere, while others are on the latest Vue. Instead you want to choose 1 framework for building your Frontend Applications. The same goes for more specialized libraries: Graphs, Maps, Date/Time handling, etcetera. Choosing one single way of doing this is not always possible, but at least reduce the number of options to a minimum and make sure these are kept up to date.

One of the most annoying, recurring tasks Developers deal with, is keeping their dependencies up to date. In Frontend Development, Dependency Hell is a real thing. The NPM ecosystem is both a blessing and a curse in that sense. If you update one library, you may be triggering a host of other dependencies to be updated as well. And each of these updates may trigger a need to make changes in your code.

Keep in mind that the most popular Framework for Enterprise Frontend Development -Angular- has a cadence to release two major version updates per year! That is two times breaking changes that need to be propagated in your codebase, tested for any regressions and released. Think of all of the lost hours to upgrade just this single Framework in order to keep up-to-date.

A Frontend Platform can take most of this pain away from your product teams. More than 80% of the dependency update effort can be automated by a Frontend Platform team, only to leave verification of the proposed changes to the product teams. That's a huge win! And it allows the Product teams to focus on adding value instead.