Why 1fe?

There are already multiple standards and patterns across the industry and within organizations. The point of 1fe is not to be yet another standard, but to be a unified platform that brings your organization’s existing standards together while enabling unprecedented flexibility and team velocity.

🏢 The Organizational Challenge

Modern organizations face a fundamental problem: frontend fragmentation. Each team independently recreates the same foundational infrastructure, leading to massive redundancy and inefficiency.

Redundancy of Effort

In large organizations, top-level experiences typically include multiple products and services, each having independently created:

• Backend servers for serving and proxying
• Frontend shells with their own layout systems
• Application experiences (top-level routing and navigation)
• PR checks and release processes
• Testing infrastructure and quality gates
• Common utilities reinvented multiple times

Taking a step back, we can identify a pattern that is repetitive and ungoverned. Each team has solved the same problems with similar solutions with almost no sharing of assets, resources, or knowledge.

Going deeper, the core utilities required by typical web applications are re-implemented multiple times across teams:

• Internationalization (i18n) - Every team builds their own translation system
• Analytics integration - Multiple implementations of the same tracking tools
• State management - Redux, Zustand, and custom solutions scattered across teams
• UI components - Deviations from and migrations to design systems happening independently
• Logging systems - Different approaches to error tracking and monitoring
• API communication - Fetch wrappers, GraphQL clients, and WebSocket implementations
• Feature flags - Multiple feature flag services and management approaches
• Authentication flows - Login, logout, and session management recreated everywhere
• Navigation systems - Internal and external routing solved differently by each team

Lack of Unified Approach

From a bird’s eye view, most organizations’ frontend ecosystems look like a bad collaboration between different companies. Each team’s experience is completely unique and disparate from the rest. There is no knowledge sharing or pattern reuse.

This leads to:

• Inconsistent code quality - A single repository looks like it’s been written by dozens of developers due to lack of uniformity
• Tribal knowledge - Domain experts emerge around basic tooling setup, creating knowledge silos
• High onboarding costs - Engineers face high ramp-up times when contributing to other teams’ codebases
• Poor interoperability - Long PR review times when teams with different patterns try to collaborate
• Unnecessary reinvention - Teams build custom solutions instead of leveraging existing tools
• Painful upgrades - Technology migrations become multi-team, multi-quarter efforts
• Version incompatibilities - One team uses React 18 while another uses React 16, requiring complex bridges

⚙️ What Makes 1fe Different

1fe is NOT just another JavaScript framework. It’s a platform and set of standards that can be implemented with any framework or library. The goal is to provide a consistent and predictable way to build and maintain frontend applications that enables:

Team Independence

• Isolated and independent sandboxed components
• Micro-frontends with micro-repositories for true team autonomy
• Reduction of guest development - no more waiting for other teams
• Independent deployment cycles - deploy when you’re ready

Developer Experience

• Consistent and predictable development patterns across all projects
• Simplified onboarding for new developers joining any team
• Reduced cognitive load from maintaining multiple standards
• Unparalleled DX with hot reloading, instant feedback, and modern tooling

Organizational Efficiency

• Maximize reuse across the organization through shared utilities
• Increased speed of development and deployment
• Abstract complexity away from product teams
• Clear separation between platform and product concerns
• Smooth upgrade paths for applications and dependencies

🔌 Dynamic Module Federation

What makes 1fe truly transformational is its dynamic module federation capability - the ability to load, update, and compose widgets at runtime without rebuilding or redeploying the host application.

Independent Team Velocity

Teams can develop, test, and deploy widgets completely independently:

• Deploy multiple times per day without coordinating with other teams
• No shared release cycles or blocking dependencies
• Instant rollbacks without affecting other widgets

Operational Excellence

Platform teams gain unprecedented control:

• Zero-downtime deployments for individual widgets
• Progressive rollouts with instant rollback capability
• Centralized dependency management across all widgets
• Performance optimization through intelligent caching and preloading

How Dynamic Federation Works

1fe achieves this through SystemJS and Import Maps that create a true runtime module federation system:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <!-- Import SystemJS from a CDN -->
    <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/systemjs@6.10.0/dist/s.min.js"></script>

    <!-- Define the Import Map -->
    <script type="systemjs-importmap">
      {
        "imports": {
          "widget1": "https://cdn.skypack.dev/react"
        }
      }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>SystemJS + Import Maps Example</h1>

    <script type="module">
      // Use SystemJS to import modules as defined by the import map
      System.import("widget1")
        .then((widgetModule) => {
          console.log("Widget loaded:", widgetModule);
        })
        .catch((err) => console.error("Error loading Widget:", err));
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

Why Traditional Micro-Frontend Approaches Fall Short

Some organizations attempt to solve frontend fragmentation with Module Federation or similar build-time solutions. However, these approaches are fundamentally limited:

Module Federation Limitations:

• Build-time coupling - Widgets must be known and configured at compile time
• Tool-specific - Tied to webpack@5, making migrations painful and expensive
• Maintenance overhead - Requires complex host/child configurations
• Not truly dynamic - Cannot load arbitrary widgets at runtime
• Poor caching - Unable to benefit from intelligent preloading and caching strategies

Module Federation keeps teams tied to specific build tools and versions, making migrations to newer, faster tools (like Turbopack, which offers 700x faster builds than webpack) extremely difficult and expensive.

1fe’s ES Module Approach

1fe solves this with standards-based dynamic loading using ES Modules and SystemJS:

Benefits of the ES Module approach:

• Tool-agnostic - Works with any bundler (webpack, Vite, Turbopack, etc.)
• Truly dynamic - Load any widget at runtime without prior configuration
• Future-proof - Based on web standards, not tool-specific implementations
• Intelligent caching - Sophisticated preloading and cache strategies
• Zero coupling - Widgets and shell are completely independent

🏗️ Technical Architecture

1fe provides a central abstraction for the development, deployment, and execution of all frontend experiences through three core components:

Single Frontend Server

• Single page application - Consolidates all HTML delivery to one optimized shell
• Backend proxying - Routes API calls from widgets to their respective backend services
• Version monitoring - Tracks widget and plugin release versions across environments
• Dependency serving - Manages shared libraries and configurations
• Logging aggregation - Centralizes UI logging and error reporting

Application Shell

• Layout system - Provides consistent header, footer, navigation, and sidebar components
• Platform utilities - Sandbox environment with logging, i18n, navigation, and more
• Dependency management - Standardized libraries (React, design systems, etc.) loaded once
• Runtime execution - Handles dynamic loading, lazy loading, and intelligent preloading
• Authentication - Centralized auth flows for all widgets that need them

Development & Build Standards

• Asset governance - Standardized output formats and module definitions
• Runtime guarantees - Well-defined APIs and execution contracts
• Code quality - Shared linting, formatting, and testing configurations
• Independent releases - Each widget can deploy daily or hourly as needed
• Version control - Plugins can pin or update widget versions independently
• Performance optimization - Best practices baked into the build process
• Scaffolding tools - Starter kits for rapid widget and plugin development

Release Pipeline Revolution

Traditional approaches suffer from interdependent and blocking release schedules where everyone writes to the same repository, leading to:

• Poor developer experience for cross-team contributions
• Long review times and overhead
• No standardized deployment patterns
• Escalations when fixes miss the release train

1fe’s approach:

• Independent repositories - Each widget owns its codebase and CI/CD pipeline
• Standardized templates - Common deployment patterns ensure consistency
• Dynamic configuration - Central config drives versioned releases across environments
• Zero server restarts - Widget deployments happen without downtime
• Quality gates - Automated promotion to environments based on build quality
• Complete automation - Teams get GitHub repos, webhooks, Slack notifications, and deployment pipelines for free

Real-World Use Case

Consider a common organizational challenge: building cross-product experiences.

A team needs to create an onboarding flow that guides users through multiple products and captures profile information. The traditional approach leads to:

• Uncertainty and delays - Unclear how to build a “one size fits all” solution
• Communication overhead - Extensive coordination with multiple product teams
• Blocking dependencies - Waiting for other teams’ release cycles
• Duplicate efforts - Building similar experiences in separate applications

With 1fe, the team can:

1. Build independently - Create their onboarding widget with its own development and deployment pipeline
2. Deploy everywhere - The widget can run in any 1fe-enabled application immediately
3. Update freely - Make changes and improvements without coordinating releases
4. Share automatically - Other teams can consume the onboarding widget in minutes, not weeks

The Widget Reuse Problem

Organizations often recreate the same user experiences multiple times. For example, a document viewer might be built separately by three different teams, each solving the same technical challenges:

• PDF rendering and optimization
• Annotation systems and user interactions
• File format support and conversion
• Performance optimization and caching

In an ideal world, one dedicated team builds the document viewer widget, and all other teams consume it. Updates to functionality, performance improvements, and new features benefit everyone automatically.

1fe makes this possible by providing the infrastructure for true widget sharing and composition.

The 1fe Promise

1fe delivers on a simple but powerful promise: allowing teams to focus on creating exceptional user experiences while the platform handles all the complexity of modern frontend development.

By providing dynamic module federation, standardized tooling, and operational excellence out of the box, 1fe transforms how organizations build and deploy frontend applications - enabling true team independence while maintaining consistency and quality at scale.

The result is faster development cycles, higher quality applications, reduced maintenance overhead, and happier developers who can focus on what they do best: building great products for users.

What 1fe Enables for Your Organization

• Eliminate redundant effort across teams and products
• Accelerate development velocity with standardized tooling and patterns
• Improve user experiences through consistent design and faster performance
• Reduce maintenance costs by centralizing common infrastructure
• Enable true innovation by freeing teams from infrastructure concerns
• Future-proof your architecture with standards-based, tool-agnostic solutions