Portlets
Portlets, or portal applets, are visual, dynamic components that make up a Web page residing in a Web portal. Typically, when an end user requests a personalized Web page, multiple portlets are invoked when that pages is created.
An example is a news/financial portal that displays a single page including updated financial news, a report on how the stock market is doing and the latest information on stocks of interest to the end user. Each component has its own portlet.
Portlets rely on APIs to access various types of information, such as user profile. The lack of standards has led portal server platform vendors to define proprietary APIs for local portal components and for invocation of remote components. This creates interoperability problems for portal customers, application vendors, content providers and portal software vendors.
From Portal standards for Web services, Network World Tech Update, 09/02/03.
Also see: Web Services for Remote Portals and Java Portlet API
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