Multiple React Applications communicating though a single redux store

Question

Back story: Current my company has a "portal" where many different internal applications are developed independently and are then iframed into the site. There is a lot of chatter between the frames (usually checking a state or setting some state for other applications to see) which are all hosted on the same domain (not cross-domain). This approach works fine but recently we are considering moving to redux as this approach seems dirty and various teams are tossing a lot of data on window.top (globally). Would something like redux be able to handle multiple "applications" "communicating" in a way that is more uniform than just reading and setting variables on window.top or would this be an improper use of redux?

Answer 1

Frames have different contexts. You'd have to refer to a parent store, e.g., expose the store (and its dispatch) via window. It's arguably cleaner than a random assortment of variables.

That said: if they're truly independent apps then I might instead opt for going truly independent via web sockets in each of the frames communicating via live updates delivered from a back end (Elixir, Node, etc.) that's well-suited for the task.

Doing so allows greater flexibility in separating out the apps (e.g., I just want app Foo running in its own window), getting the inter-frame comms onto a common bus so anything else that wants to look in on those messages can, etc.