A CSS Facades website is a set of classes and mixins that simplify the code required to interact with third-party plugins, such as chat widgets or video embeds. It’s a common technique to employ when creating a deferred third-party solution for websites with many interdependent features. The main advantage of using a facade is to improve performance and mitigate the risk of introducing incompatibilities between plugins. This is particularly relevant when working with a large number of dependencies, such as those encountered in front-end frameworks such as NgRx.
The facade pattern is a classic design pattern described in the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. It offers a “unified interface to a set of interfaces in a subsystem,” which makes the subsystem easier to use.
Imagine you have a complex subsystem, such as a web application that pulls data from multiple data sources via web API’s. This is a good candidate for the Facade Pattern because it can be difficult to manage a lot of dependencies between different modules, especially when there are many different data sources. A facade can help to reduce this complexity by offering a simplified interface that combines the functionality of the various modules.
This is achieved by providing a parent module that defines an interface and a set of classes or mixins that implement that interface. A client program can then use this facade to access the underlying modules and services. This simplifies the interaction between the different components and makes it less likely that they will conflict with each other.
For example, let’s say that you want to build a facade for a web application that uses three different data sources: two different web API’s and a database. You could create a single module for each of these modules, but then you would have to deal with the complexity of using these separate modules individually. However, if you instead created a parent module that defined an interface and a set of class or mixins to implement the interface, then you would only need to include this one module in your application. This makes it much simpler to manage the dependencies between your modules.
Facades are also useful for reducing cognitive load on the client by hiding implementation details from them. This allows the client to focus on the business logic of an operation without needing to understand how the internals of a subsystem work.
The downside of using a facade is that the extra layer of indirection introduces some overhead. It’s important to consider the cost-benefit trade-off before implementing a facade in your codebase. For example, if you use NgRx and have a complex architecture that requires a lot of dependencies between state, actions, reducers, and selectors, you may not see significant gains from using a facade. For the best results, it’s recommended to test the effectiveness of a facade on a staging site before deploying it to production. Also, if your website depends on a lot of third-party functionality, such as dynamic ads or autoplay videos, the resulting performance gains may not be worth the added complexity of dealing with facades.