What Is a Portlet

What Is a Portal?

In order to understand what a portlet is, it is very necessary to understand what a portal is. According to the Portlet Specification, "a portal is a web application that commonly provides personalization, single sign on, content aggregation from different sources, and hosts the presentation layer of information systems. Aggregation is the act of integrating content from different sources within a web page."

Portal functionality can be divided into three main parts:

1. Portlet container: A portlet container is very similar to a servlet container, in that every portlet is deployed inside a portlet container that controls the life cycle of the portlet and provides it with necessary resources and information about its environment. A portlet container is responsible for initializing and destroying portlets and also for passing user requests to it and collecting responses.
2. Content aggregator: As defined in the Portlet Specification, one of the main jobs of a portal is to aggregate content generated by various portlet applications. We will talk more about this in the "How a Portal Page is Created" section.
3. Common services: One of the main strengths of a portal server is the set of common services that it provides. Services are not part of the portlet specification, but commercial portal implementations provide a rich set of common services to distinguish themselves from their competitors. A few common services that you can hope to find in most implementations are:

   • Single sign on: Allows you to get access to all other applications once you log into the portal server, meaning you don't have to log into every application separately. For example, once I log in to my intranet site, I should get access to my mail application, IM messaging application, and other intranet applications, without having to log into each of these applications separately.

     A portal server will provide you with a secured credentials store. What you do is to go to the mail application and specify your user name and password once. This information will be stored in the credentials store in encrypted form. From the next time onwards, when you log into your intranet site, the portal server will read your credentials from the store and log into your mail server on your behalf. The same goes for other applications.

   • Personalization: The basic implementation of personalization service allows a user to customize her page in two ways. First, the user can decide what colors she wants for title bars and what icons she wants for controls. Second, the user can decide which portlets she wants on her page. For example, if I'm a big sports fan, I will probably replace the stock and news update portlets with a portlet that lets me track my favorite team.

     There are also a few advanced commercial implementations of personalization services that allow you to decide which applications should be displayed to user based on criteria such as his income or interests. In this case, you can create some business rules like "Show the premium products portlet to any user with X amount of income" and "Show the discount deals portlet to users with Y amount of income."

   There are a few more common services such as machine translation, in which case the portal server will take content generated by portlet in one language and machine translate it into a language requested by user. Most of the commercial portal servers provide access via handheld devices and are capable of generating different content for different browsers.

What Are Portlets?

Similar to servlets, portlets are web components that are deployed inside of a container and generate dynamic content. On the technical side, a portlet is a class that implements the javax.portlet.Portlet interface and is packaged and deployed as a .war file inside of a portlet container.

Portlets are similar to servlets, in that:

1. Portlets are managed by a specialized container.
2. Portlets generate dynamic content.
3. A portlet's life cycle is managed by the container.
4. Portlets interact with web client via a request/response paradigm.

Portlets are different from servlets, in that:

1. Portlets only generate markup fragments, not complete documents.
2. Portlets are not directly URL addressable. You cant send somebody URL of a portlet. You can send him the URL of the page containing a portlet.
3. Portlets cannot generate arbitrary content, since the content generated by a portlet is going to be part of portal page. If a portal server is asking for html/text, then all portlets should generate text/html content. On the other hand, if the portal server is asking for WML, then each portlet should generate WML content.