What Is A Portlet
What Is A Portlet?
Portlets are reusable Web modules within a Web portal Typically, a page of a portal is divided into a collection of windows, the contents of each of which is defined by a different portlet. Each portlet is intended for a simple application, such as news services, weather reports, or feature-related forums or email. As the windows, the portlets can be closed or reduced, or moved. The user who accesses the portal can then customize your personal page, adapting the contents of the same suit your needs.
A portlet is also a software application that can be placed in a web portal, which then serves as a container. It is an object that displays a box on a web page and is often issued by applets. A portlet processes the requests of a task or a particular service and dynamically generates web content displayed to the user. Portlets can provide all kinds of general or specialized services (consultation interface records, personal calendar, directory, information panel, integrating a search engine, weather, etc.)
Standards
The portlet and portal technology uses a set of standards in order to enable the development of portlets portable, or they can be used in the context of portals developed with different technologies.
The WSRP standard (Web Services for Remote Portlets) defines a standard protocol for dialogue between the portal and portlets. The Java Portlet Specification (JSR168) defines a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for the interaction between a portlet and portlet container, a widespread deployment of Apache Pluto is JSR168 specification, and other implementations have been developed by IBM, Oracle and BEA Systems.
Among the open source implementations of portals, there are also conform to the standard Jetspeed 2 Portal Server (again developed by Apache), JBoss Portal, Liferay Portal and stringbeans Portal.
Uses Of Portlet
From the perspective of the web interface, the portlet is viewed by the user as a component that can plug in where they want a customized view of its portal. It will show information from different portlets in one page web portal with a system based panels, tabs or columns.
By respecting the portlet specification (JSR 168, JSR 286, WSRP) it is possible to use the same portlet on different portals.
In practice, a portlet is developed and deployed on a portal. The administrator who manages the web portal can then publish in a particular category to be visible to all users or a targeted population.
Portlet and Servlet
Portlets are a special type of servlet, designed to fit easily into a portal server and be executed. Unlike servlets, portlets do not have direct communication with the browser, thus can not send redirects or errors, forward calls or write markup to outflow.
Portlets are components simpler and therefore lighter. This allows for greater ease of management: they can be set, installed or removed, created or deleted and set directly by using the portal interface.
Unlike servlets, which can provide complete web pages, the portlets represent individual components, aggregated by the portal that acts as a web container. It follows that the portlet container of the portal has a more central role of the servlet container, because through it the portlets communicate between themselves, access to remote content and persistent data. Moreover, the portlet can not be reached by a specific URL, as is the portal to have associated the entire address.
Study: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons.
