What are portlets

[farooq]

Hi
i need some information about portlets and portal server,
what is the diff between a servlet and a portlet,what are the portlet containers available .may be some body can suggest a good book on portlets.
thanx

[Adeel Ansari]

Portlet: http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid26_gci947404,00.html
Portal: http://searchsmb.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid44_gci212810,00.html
Similarities and differences in servlet and protlet:
http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/[e-mail]/514070.html

We have many portals available like,

- BEA Weblogic Portal
- IBM Websphere Portal

[Ulf Dittmer]

In the Java space, you might check out JetSpeed from Jakarta, which is deployable in Tomcat.

[Kishore Dandu]

I would like to add: Vignette portal.

[Mehdi Chaouachi]

The most popular java portals currently are the following :
- Liferay
- Exo
- JBoss

[ankur rathi]

Let me try,

Portlet - It is just an window but may provide the whole functionality like any application. User can customize it according to his/her need. There may be many portlets on one page, every portlet may/may not interact with each other. It is modified form of servlet, in fact we can say it is nothing but a servlet.

Portal Server - It provides resources to run any portlet just like application server provides for servlet.

Please correct me if I am wrong.
Thanks.

[Pradeep bhatt]

Apaches Pluto server is a portal server.

[M Streit]

You might also check out:

http://www.nabh.com/

for info on open source portal solutions.

[Jignesh Patel]

Portlet can be comparaple with Tiles, if any body worked with struts.
But different between Tiles and Portlate is
Portlet can provide remote integration while displaying in a desktop(ie. desktop is a view which integrats many portlets) but tiles can't.

And portal is container of collection of several application with various functionalities.

Here one application may represent 1 portlet.

[Stefan Zoerner]

Some of your questions are already answered within this thread, especially the link by Adeel Ansari about servlet-portlet diffs provides interesting information. Do you have a specific question about servlets and portlets, that is not covered by this resource?

Only a few books about JSR 168 exist, one is "Building Portals with the Java Portlet API" (Homepage) by J. Linwood, D. Minter (APress 2004). This one is intersting from my point of view. More books exist on specific portal servers. For IBM WebSphere Portal server I would recommend to get the relevant Redbooks, which are available for free (PDF, HTML).

Greetings Stefan