title: What's a good way to merge remote, standalone web apps into a virtual site?
body: <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>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:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>script src="..../site/include?appid=xxx"  // app id determines which tab/navigation to display</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>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? </p>