Frontend System Design Essentials
Frontend System Design Essentials
A practical guide to designing scalable, reliable, and maintainable frontend systems.
About the Book
Modern frontend applications look simple on the surface, but behind every smooth user experience is a system of data flows, rendering strategies, caching layers, pagination models, and real-time updates. This book breaks down those complexities and helps you understand how to design frontends that scale — not just in performance, but in clarity, maintainability, and user experience.
Frontend System Design Essentials introduces a structured approach for thinking about complex UI architecture through the CCDAO framework. You’ll learn how to analyse product requirements, model data effectively, design APIs that support real-world access patterns, and apply techniques like virtualization, optimistic updates, pagination, caching, and performance optimization.
Rather than presenting abstract theories, the book uses concrete case studies — typeahead search, feed lists, modals, and more — to show how system design decisions play out in practice. Each chapter builds on the last, helping you form a mental model you can use in interviews or in your day-to-day work as a senior engineer.
If you want to grow beyond “just building UI” and start designing frontends that hold up under real-world pressure, this book gives you the tools, patterns, and clarity to do it well.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Reading and Writing Data
- What We’ll Cover in This Book
- Summary
- Chapter 1 — From Components to Systems
- How a simple request turns complex
- Part I — How a small component grows
- Part II — Zooming out to the system
- Part III — Thinking in systems
- A note on CCDAO and the interview lens
- Summary — The invisible work
- Chapter 2 — The CCDAO Framework: A Systematic Approach to Frontend System Design
- Collect Information
- Component Structure
- Data Modeling
- API Design
- Optimization Strategies
- Applying CCDAO in an Interview
- Why It Matters Beyond Interviews
- Chapter 3 — Applying CCDAO: Designing a Typeahead Search Box
- 1. Collect Information
- 2. Component Structure
- 3. Data Modeling
- 4. API Design
- 5. Optimization Strategies
- Closing
- Chapter 4 — Applying CCDAO: Designing a Scalable Feed List
- 1. Collect Information
- 2. Component Structure
- 3. Data Modeling
- 4. API Design
- 5. Optimization Strategies
- Closing
- Chapter 5 — Data Modeling: Understanding the Domain and the UI
- Seeing the Domain Clearly
- Modeling for How the UI Uses Data
- From Domain to Design
- Chapter 6 — Case Study: Sidebar Navigation and Feature Entitlements
- Step 1 — The Starting Point: Logic in the UI
- Step 2 — When the Rules Multiply
- Step 3 — Moving Business Logic to the Backend
- Step 4 — Where Frontend Logic Still Belongs
- Step 5 — Tailoring APIs with GraphQL or a BFF
- Lessons from the Sidebar
- Chapter 7 — Setting Up the Project Environment
- Why We Use a Starter Project
- Prerequisites
- Getting the Project Running
- Useful Scripts
- Mock API Setup (MSW)
- Mock Endpoints Provided
- Data Shapes You’ll Work With
- Project Structure (High-Level)
- Troubleshooting
- What Comes Next
- Chapter 8 — Normalisation
- Why Normalisation Matters
- A Real Example: Inconsistent User Data
- Normalisation: A Consistent Source of Truth
- Transforming the Board Payload
- React Context: Holding the Normalised Store
- Hydrating When Rendering
- Summary
- Chapter 9 — How Backend Databases Inspire Frontend Normalization
- A Familiar Pattern From Databases
- How Databases Reconstruct Data
- The Frontend Equivalent
- Why This Matters
- A Good Place to Pause
- Chapter 10 — Data Fetching: Managing Requests
- Showing Real Assignees in the UI
- Extending the Backend API
- Updating the Board on Selection
- Understanding Race Conditions in Search
- Fixing Race Conditions with Request Cancellation
- Reducing Request Volume with Debouncing and Throttling
- Summary
- Chapter 11 — Pagination
- Demonstrating Pagination in
UserSelect
- The Pagination Strategies
- A Simple Users Table
- Offset Pagination
- Cursor Pagination
- Choosing the Right Strategy for
UserSelect
- UI Patterns for Pagination
- Summary
- Demonstrating Pagination in
- Chapter 12 — Migrating to Express
- A Brief Introduction to Express
- Migration
- Connecting the Frontend
- Summary
- Chapter 13 — Server-Side Rendering
- Rendering strategies
- How SSR works
- Bringing SSR into our application
- Creating the client entry (hydration)
- Creating the server entry (rendering on the server)
- Creating separate entry points
- Configuring Vite for SSR
- Configuring Vite to build both entries
- Generating HTML on the server
- Bringing it together in the Express SSR route
- Why consistency matters
- From SSR to SPA behaviour
- Summary
- Chapter 14 – Code Splitting and Lazy Loading
- Why Lazy Loading Helps
- The Building Blocks of Lazy Loading
- Implementing Lazy Loading in Our Board Application
- Another Example: Lazy Loading the List View
- Understanding the Build Output After Code Splitting
- What Happens at Runtime
- How Code Splitting Changes the Bundle
- Summary
- Chapter 15 – Prefetch
- How Prefetch Works Conceptually
- The Prefetch Function Inside QueryProvider
- Exposing Prefetch Through a Hook
- Prefetching Users in Card.tsx
- How Prefetch and useQuery Work Together
- The Full Runtime Experience
- When Prefetch Helps
- When Prefetch Doesn’t Help
- Summary
- Chapter 16 – Data Mutation and Optimistic Updates
- Creating a New Card (Server-First)
- Introducing Optimistic Updates
- Adding a Card Optimistically
- Deleting a Card Optimistically
- Things to Keep in Mind
- Summary
- Chapter 17 – Realtime Updates
- Polling
- Server-Sent Events (SSE)
- WebSockets
- Scaling Considerations
- Summary
- Chapter 18 – Realtime Updates with Server-Sent Events
- The pub-sub pattern
- A simple implementation of pub-sub
- Using the event emitter with SSE
- Emitting events from the update API
- Frontend: consuming SSE with EventSource
- Demonstration and behaviour
- Summary
- Preface
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