A coworker came to me with a problem. The client he was working with would be building hundreds of single-page applications and all would need to be tied into a single shell application. He had first attempted to use an iFrame contained within another single-page application to display the child applications.

While this worked, he came up against another requirement: the child applications may or may not need access to data from the parent shell application.

It was at this point he came to me for suggestions. I had been playing with this exact idea for sometime; how can you manage a collection of Single-Page Applications and still share data between them?

At this point, I decided to create a hybrid solution of mixing Single-Page Applications with a server-rendered shell application. The following is the process I took for creating this solution, highlighting some of the pain points with some suggestions for further enhancements.