IBM® offers many products, such as WebSphere® Portal, that provide a portal environment in which applications can be installed and run. A portal in simplistic terms is a single point of access to multiple information sources. Each information source is called a portlet. A portlet is one of the small windows or content areas that appears on a portal page.
By putting portlets on a portal page, many "applications" or sources of data can be displayed at once. Since an individual portlet can process data from any available back-end server, a portal page provides consolidation of data independent of data location or data format.
The individual portlets on a page may or may not be related. When portlets are related, it is helpful when the portlets are able work together to perform a set of tasks for the end user. Portlets that are able to communicate with each other to perform related tasks are called cooperative portlets.
iSeries™ Access for Web portlets provide portal functionality for accessing iSeries i5/OS® resources.
The following topics contain more information about portlets and their usage.