keeping links internal to an iframe

Question

I am working on developing for lack of a better term, a portal application that consists of a series of deployed WAR files all deployed on the same Weblogic server. Basically, I have one application that serves the navigation and a few other things. This contains an iframe that I load the other applications into.

However, when a link is clicked on in one of the internal applications I get a 404. The applications I'm loading into the iframe don't know that it is being loaded into the iframe. I use a javascript function that handles loading the link into the iframe. This link is basically another application (in a WAR file) deployed on the same server instance.

Is there a better way than using an iframe? Can I get this behavior? I have complete control over everything being deployed to this server and all of the applications internal to it. I'm trying to work around a few legacy issues here and thought using the iframe would be an easy way to do it.

Answer 1

There's not many options to gather legacy applications under a "portal", the only one I know of is actually the iframe. But I don't get your link problem. Any link is by default internal to your iframe and the application doesn't need to know it's displayed within an iframe. Why bothering with javascript? Any reason why you can't have application A linking to application B directly?