Indeed, there was tonnes of n-tier architecture stuff in Java EE land in the 90s. SOAP - Service Orchestration and Automation was/is another concept from the 9

Indeed, there was tonnes of n-tier architecture stuff in Java EE land in the 90s. SOAP - Service Orchestration and Automation was/is another concept from the 90s that is conceptually similar to GraphQL. I don't like the terms front-end and back-end. In reality applications are using a variety of internal & external services these days, and not all of them are behind a backend necessarily. Your own micro-services are meant to be used in much the same way as any third party's endpoint.