Five Strategies for Creating Composable Applications

  • Hackmamba
    Hackmamba
    Marketing
  • Annie
    Annie
    Sales & Marketing

The composable architecture approach to building applications has become the go-to strategy for organizations seeking to stay competitive and meet their customer’s constant demands. Currently, 72% of organizations already use composable architecture in some form, with another 21% planning to adopt it within the year. This marks a complete shift from the monolithic approach, where all functionalities are tightly coupled, making maintenance difficult and often causing total application outages when a single feature fails.

While composable architectures seem like the ultimate solution for building scalable, fast, robust and secure applications, specific strategies are necessary to ensure you’re building a truly composable application.

In this article, we’ll explore five practical strategies for creating composable applications, with real-world examples and actionable insights to help you adopt this approach effectively.

Strategies for Creating Composable Applications

Below are the five essential strategies for creating composable applications:

1. Embrace Modular Architecture

The foundation of composability lies in modular design. This approach involves breaking down your application into distinct, self-contained modules or components that can focus on specific functions and operate independently while seamlessly integrating with others. Adopting this mindset is essential when building a composable business model. Below are some of the benefits:

  • Separation of Concerns: When you break your applications into modules with distinct functionalities, it becomes easier to manage, maintain, and deploy. For example, a module dedicated to processing payments or user onboarding can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. 
  • Flexibility and Scalability: In a composable application, you can update, replace, or scale independent components without impacting the entire system.
  • Reusability: Modules can be reused in different projects or within another section of the same project. For example, a notification component built with Angular or Next.js can be used in multiple applications within the same ecosystem.
  • Easier Collaboration: Modular architecture promotes parallel development and skill specialization. Team members can work on separate modules simultaneously, focusing on their areas of expertise and accelerating the overall delivery.

To get started, carefully assess your project requirements and keep the following in mind:

  • Design your modules or components around business processes, not technical functions.
  • Set boundaries between modules.
  • Establish effective communication channels among modules.
  • Keep modules loosely coupled to ensure they work effectively together.

Composable architecture is an approach we frequently use to develop complex applications for our clients. For instance, Birchbox partnered with us to migrate their legacy monolith ecommerce solution to a fast and new composable platform. We broke the application into distinct services like authentication, middleware, and internalization while also integrating third-party API and Prismic to create a fast, customized, and memorable shopping experience.

2. Use Clean Interface Contracts

Implementing clean interface contracts in composable applications means defining clear, standardized methods of interaction between different modular components. This ensures that components know exactly how to communicate with each other, which makes them consistent and predictable across the application. Below are the benefits of having a standardized method of communication:

  • Consistency: When modules have a clean interface contract to communicate, it reduces ambiguity and ensures consistency across platforms, regardless of who is building them.
  • Decoupling and Flexibility: As long as the contract remains unchanged, modules can operate independently and support updates or replacements without disrupting the system.
  • Ease of Integration: A well-defined contract makes integrating third-party services and adding new modules easy. As long as new modules follow the interface rules, onboarding time and integration overhead are reduced.
  • Enhanced Security: Data validation and access control have become straightforward, as the interface serves as the single source of truth. This makes the application secure, and the behavior is more predictable.

To create effective interface contracts, consider the following:

  • Define clear API contracts using OpenAPI specifications or interface definition languages.
  • Use strong typing and validation at interface boundaries.
  • Use versioning for your interface.
  • Support backward compatibility when possible.
  • Create a comprehensive documentation for all the interfaces.

An example of using clean interface contracts is our collaboration with GitHub to build a resource hub. This platformhelps developers find any resources they need to build better software. We used interface contracts to structure communication between the backend, frontend, and DevOps services, guaranteeing seamless interaction across the application.

3. Use API-First Development

API-first development means designing and building application programming interfaces (APIs) as the initial step before developing the other parts of the application. With this foundation, all features, modules and external integrations can interact through standardized APIs. This approach serves as the bridge between software systems and allows you to create a composable infrastructure where individual components can be added, removed, and replaced with little or no friction. Below are the benefits of composable applications when adopting an API-first development:

  • Scalability Across Platforms: APIs are platform-agnostic, meaning the same set of APIs can be used to power your new and existing applications across mobile apps, web apps and other digital experience layers.
  • Consistency and Reusability: When all components and services rely on a standardized API, new functionality can easily be composed from existing components, which promotes reuse.
  • Centralized Integration Point: An API-first approach maintains the underlying structure by enabling all modules to interact through a unified integration layer, making integrating new features or third-party services easier.

To adopt an API-first approach effectively, consider the following:

  • Thoroughly analyze project requirements to determine what should be included at the API level.
  • Define clear API specifications and follow RESTful principles (like statelessness and standard HTTP methods).
  • Use tools like Postman and Swagger to document your APIs, so that you and your team to integrate services efficiently.
  • Prioritize security by implementing authentication and authorization mechanisms.

4. Adopt a Headless Content Management System

A headless content management system (CMS) allows you to separate content storage and management from the presentation layer, which gives you the flexibility to create diverse experiences across platforms. Headless CMSs are particularly important if you're building a content-rich application, as they enable you and your team to work on different layers independently without dependency on a single platform or presentation layer. Below are some of the benefits of adopting a headless CMS:

  • Flexibility on the Frontend Development: Because content is delivered via API, you have the flexibility to present it across mobile, web and other platforms without being tied to a specific technology.
  • Enhanced Personalization and Localization: With headless CMS, you have the flexibility to dynamically tailor content based on users' preferences, devices, locations and much more.
  • Streamlined Content Delivery: Content can be reused and distributed across multiple channels (such as websites, mobile apps and digital displays), which ensures consistent messaging and branding across platforms.

To adopt a headless CMS, consider the following:

  • Define the project’s specific needs regarding content type, distribution channels and user experience goals.
  • Evaluate headless CMS providers to find one that meets your needs and integrates well with your existing tech stack.
  • Use taxonomies and custom fields to organize and model your content.
  • Embrace the separation between content management and presentation layers.

An example of using a headless CMS is our collaboration with Hy-Vee—a prominent supermarket chain in the Midwest. We used Sanity as our headless CMS with other technologies to redefine the user experience across Hy-Vee’s products (Red Media, Opportunity Summit, and KidsFit).

5. Build a Robust Component Library

Frontend development plays a significant role in shaping your application’s overall user experience. Component-based frameworks like Next.js, Svelte, Vue and Astro help you build reusable components that can be used to create various experiences. These software components are modular and support flexibility, consistency, and ease of maintenance, as each component represents a distinct part of the UI with its own logic, styling, and behavior. Below are some of the benefits of having a robust component library:

  • Reusability and Modularity: Component-based architecture encourages the creation of UI elements that you can quickly update, maintaining design consistency and reducing development time through reusability.
  • Improved Consistency: When you update a component, changes are propagated across the application, which helps you maintain uniformity and reduce design inconsistencies.
  • Ease of Testing: Components can be individually tested to ensure that they function as designed before being integrated into the larger application.
  • Support for Advanced Features: Component-based frameworks usually come with support for advanced features like server-side rendering (SSR), hydration, and progressive web app (PWA) capabilities, enhancing both user experience and performance.

To build a robust component library, consider the following:

  • Use design tokens to manage colors, typography, spacing and layout to ensure consistency.
  • Break down components to their smallest logical unit so that they can easily be reused across the application.
  • Create standards for testing how individual components work and when integrating with other components.
  • Use a design system to manage your component library.
  • Use tools like Storybook to showcase component states and configurations.

A real-world example of how composable applications enable businesses to scale and innovate faster is our work with Checkly—a code monitoring platform. We used Next.js to refresh the brand identity and revamp the marketing website to effectively communicate its offerings to target audiences.

In addition to the five main strategies mentioned above, another composable technology teams are also adopting is the concept of Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs), which are small, self-contained building blocks that handle specific business tasks, like managing payments or customer information. Each block has everything it needs to do its job, from data to workflows to the user interface, and it can work on its own without depending heavily on other blocks.

Next Step

Building a composable application requires embracing a modular architecture, using interface contracts, following the API-first approach, adopting a headless CMS, and building a component library. It saves you from technical debt and gives you and your team control to collaborate and build better applications.

To learn more about composable applications, check out our portfolio to see what a composable version of your application could look like, and contact us today for a free consultation.