When logged into to Google, the Google homepage links to multiple other services (e.g. Gmail, Play, Drive).
Q1) Is there a SOA pattern that describes the way that they loosely couple the UIs for each service, but at the same time also providing a standard menu bar, standard look and feel and single sign on across their applications?
Q2) Is there any documentation available that describes their architecture for linking the UI content?
Edit
I have taken a look with Firebug and it seems like there is a two way relationship between the menubar and the application. The menubar has a link to each application, but each application also has the menu bar included.
I can relate this to the eclipse UI, where an application can contribute to the application menu, but each menu lives in the context of the eclipse application which aggregates all the separate UI plugins.
So how does google do this in their UI? It looks like there is some javascript wizardry going on, with the menu bar being injected into each application.