3rd party applications inside iFrames?

Question

I am about to build a web application and I want to allow other developers extend it with their own applications.

Should I do this with iFrames like Facebook?

Is this a good practice?

Are there other alternatives that let other developers extend my application (that is for the user it looks like it's from my application).

To be specific:

I want developers to be able to code applications that is embedded on my web application. Eg. if I have a file on my application they could provide a way for the users to interact with that file. Maybe a "preview" application that let the users preview the file.

Another application might draw a mindmap tree view of all the user's files.

What is the best way of doing this?

• iFrame + Restful API on backend for data exchange?
• Let them insert javascript on backend + frontend + html + css on my web application?
• Other alternatives?

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean by "extend". When you use iFrames with 3rd parties, presumably vended from different domains than the host page, then you are constrained by cross-domain issues and cannot interact with the contents of those iFrames. If that's not an issue for you, then you can go ahead and try that strategy, but I can't see how merely adding iFrames without interopability is "extending" your web application.