Portals

In the following sections, the concepts of portals and portlets, but not the entire portlet specification, are explained. First, some fundamental aspects of portlet development need to be presented in order to ensure your understanding. We will start with some definitions pertaining to portal components. • Client’s point of view: A portal is an integrated and personalized Web-based application that provides the end user with a single point of access to a wide variety of aggregated content (data, knowledge, and services), anytime and from anywhere, using any Web-enabled client device. This definition represents the client’s view of a portal application. • Developer’s point of view: A portlet is a Java based Web component managed by a portlet container that processes requests and generates dynamic content. A portlet container provides a run time environment for portlets and manages their lifecycle.