What's a good way to merge remote, standalone web apps into a virtual site?

Question

We have a few dozen web apps on multiple servers/platforms owned by 5 teams at our company and want to merge them into a single site. The UI part is straightforward - a common header with login/status info, tabs for the major sections of the site, and yui menus for navigation within a section.

The hard part is finding a way to do this while making minimal changes to the existing apps, which are easily breakable and a pain to deploy. We want to minimize updates to the apps and try to get it right the first time.

The only working solution we have now is to include a Javascript file to write the site header/navigation at the top of the page, which lets us easily deploy changes to all of the apps:

script src="..../site/include?appid=xxx" // app id determines which tab/navigation to display

Is there a better way to do this, especially one with better performance than remote dynamic Javascript that writes the entire page header? Are there existing frameworks to simplify this?

Answer 1

Consider using a portal framework like uPortal. You could aggregate all those webapps -- no matter what technologies they're written in -- by leveraging a web proxy solution.

This suggestion might be overkill if your needs are really & truly simple; but uPortal (and others) provide scores of additional functions -- like administration, statistics, SSO, and integrations with other platforms and services -- that quickly add to their attractiveness.