Portlets

For latest portlets, see the IBM WebSphere Portal Business Solutions Catalog.

Portlets use a model-view-controller design, with multiple states and view modes, plus event and messaging capabilities.

Portlet are servlets that run on appservers, and are aggregated to a complete Web page by the WebSphere Portal server.

Portlets rely on the WebSphere Portal infrastructure to...

• look up credentials
• access user profile information
• participate in window and action events
• communicate with other portlets
• access remote content
• store persistent data

Portlet applications consisting of several portlets can be installed or removed while WebSphere Portal is running. Settings and access rights can also be changed by an administrator while portal is running.

Portlet modes, invoked by icons on the portlet title bar, include:

• View
• Help
• Edit
• Configure
• Edit Shared Settings

Portlet API

The Java Portlet Specification defines how to create portlets. WebSphere Portal supports both portlet standards JSR 168 and JSR 286.

Portlet communications

Portlet communication is used to exchange data between portlets via events and wires.

For example, one portlet can display an account list, while a second portlet displays detail information about a particular account. When the account list portlet throws an event, the account detail portlet receives the event, and can shows detail information.

Portlet services

Provides common functionality to portlets. Supported for standard portlets, not supported for IBM portlets. Portlets use a JNDI lookup to retrieve a PortletServiceHome object, which is used to retrieve a portlet service implementation. A portlet service can be invoked only by the code within a portlet.

Web Experience Factory

Web Experience Factory is included with WebSphere Portal and provides a selection of builders for developing service-oriented portlets and Web 2.0 style applications with features like...

• drag-and-drop
• in-line editing
• type-ahead search
• intelligent page refresh functionality

Web Experience Factory uses a pre-built connector library to integrate data from...

• SAP
• Siebel
• PeopleSoft
• Lotus Domino
• Web and REST services
• relational databases

Applications built with Web Experience Factory can be deployed to...

• WebSphere Portal
• Mashup Center
• Lotus Notes
• Expeditor
• WebSphere Application Server

Parent: Web content