Portlet container

The portlet container is the runtime environment for portlets using the JSR 286 Portlet specification, in which portlets are instantiated, used, and finally destroyed. The JSR 286 Portlet application programming interface (API) provides standard interfaces for portlets and backwards compatibility for JSR 168 portlets. Portlets that are based on this JSR 286 Portlet Specification are referred to as standard portlets.

The PortletServingServlet servlet provides a simple portal framework, which builds on top of the portlet container. This servlet registers itself with each web application that contains portlets. You can use the PortletServingServlet servlet to directly render a portlet into a full browser page by a URL request and invoke each portlet by its context root and name. For more information, see Portlet Uniform Resource Locator (URL) addressability. Also, you can use the URL addressability feature to include remote portlet content using the remote request dispatcher (RRD).

If you want to aggregate multiple portlets on a page, you can use the dedicated aggregation tag library, which is based on the PortletServingServlet servlet. For more information, see Portlet aggregation using JavaServer Pages for additional information. For coordination between portlets on a given page, the aggregation tag library supports the use of the Public Render Parameters, as specified by the JSR 286 Portlet Specification.

The portal framework, which is provided with the PortletServingServlet servlet, enables you to render only one portlet at a time. Thus, only a subset of the optional features in the JSR 286 Portal Specification are supported. To determine which optional features are supported, see Supported optional features of the JSR 286 Portlet Specification.

Attention: The brokering of events between portlets is out of the scope of the specification and is not handled by the PortletServingServlet servlet. For full portlet coordination support, you can deploy the portlets on comprehensive portal products, such as the WebSphere Portal Server.

You can disable the PortletServingServlet servlet in an extended portlet deployment descriptor called the ibm-portlet-ext.xmi file. For more information, see Example: Configuring the extended portlet deployment descriptor to disable PortletServingServlet.