In the context of modern software engineering, decoupling—breaking an application into distinct parts—has emerged as an industry standard. Companies and software engineers alike favor decoupling because it allows for a clear separation of concerns between an application’s presentation layer (front end) and its data access layer (back end). This approach enhances an app’s efficiency by allowing for parallel development by multiple teams while also offering the flexibility to choose optimal technologies for each side.

Given its modular nature, a decoupled system’s independent components can be targeted for scaling, modification, or outright replacement as the system’s needs evolve. This practice extends across diverse digital platforms, including areas like e-commerce, online banking, community-driven portals, and social media.

While a decoupled system offers many advantages, it also carries potential drawbacks. The system’s communication occurs across different modules or services and can introduce latency, which slows system performance. In addition, traditional browser cookie and server-side authentication methods designed for monolithic applications become challenging.

To address these concerns, developers can leverage protocols like GraphQL, REST, and gRPC to facilitate excellent intercomponent communication, prevent delays, and structure the implementation of authentication. This tutorial demonstrates that decoupled apps can thrive: In a WordPress-powered Angular app, we will achieve secure communication using GraphQL and JWT, a popular token-based authentication method.

Efficient Communication in Decoupled Systems: An Angular-WordPress Example

We will build a blog application with a headless WordPress back end and an Angular front end. WordPress, a widely adopted, robust content management system (CMS), is ideal for managing and serving blog content. The choice of Angular is strategic, as it allows for dynamic content updates without requiring full-page reloads, which yields accelerated user interactions. Communication between the two layers will be managed by GraphQL.

Initially, the app will be configured to fetch blog post content and display the post titles to users in a list. After it is up and running, you’ll enhance the unprotected blog application by integrating a JWT-based authentication feature. Through this token-based authentication, you ensure that only logged-in users have access. Unauthenticated visitors will see the list of titles but be prompted to sign in or register if they attempt to read a full post.