Server-side page fragment composition

Context

You have applied the [[Microservice architecture]] pattern. Services are developed by business capability/subdomain-oriented teams that are also responsible for the user experience. Some UI screens/pages display data from multiple service. Consider, for example, an Amazon-style product detail page, which displays numerous data items including:

• Basic information about the book such as title, author, price, etc.

• Your purchase history for the book

• Availability

• Buying options

• Other items that are frequently bought with this book

• Other items bought by customers who bought this book

• Customer reviews

• Sellers ranking

• …

Each data item corresponds to a separate service and how it is displayed is, therefore, the responsibility of a different team.

Problem

How to implement a UI screen or page that displays data from multiple services?

Forces

Solution

Each team developers a web application that generates the HTML fragment that implements the region of the page for their service. A UI team is responsible for developing the page templates that build pages by performing server-side aggregation (e.g. server-side include style mechanism) of the service-specific HTML fragments.

Related patterns

The [[Client-side UI composition]] pattern is an alternative approach