1. A system to provide a virtual application desktop and communication framework, comprising: a virtual machine executing on an operating system using which multiple applications can concurrently execute; a plurality of applications each having a protected namespace and configured to execute within the virtual machine; a request box for each of the plurality of applications; and a centralized communication engine configured to control communications between each request box, the centralized communication engine being configured to retrieve, transfer and distribute data between the request boxes of the plurality of applications in response to requests from the plurality of applications.