JSR168

"The Portlet specification will define a Portlet API that provides means for aggregating several content sources and applications front ends. It will also address how the security and personalization is handled.

Portlets are web components -like Servlets- specifically designed to be aggregated in the context of a composite page. Usually, many Portlets are invoked to in the single request of a Portal page. Each Portlet produces a fragment of markup that it s combined with the markup of other Portlets, all within the Portal page markup.

The Portlet specification will define the different components for Portal Computing, their interaction, lifecycle and semantics. These components will comprise -but they will not be restricted to-: Portlets, Deployment descriptor, Portlet APIs. In addition, APIs for vendor extensions, APIs for security, user customization and layout management will be considered.

Also, it will define the minimum set of possible window states for a Portlet such as normal, minimized, maximized, etc.-, the valid state transitions and Portlet modes (such as view, edit, help, configure) per markup language.

This first version of the Portlet specification will concentrate in the following design goals:

• Client agnostic
• Support for multiple types of clients (multi-device)
• Simple Portlet API
• Support for Localization and Internationalization
• Hot deployment and re-deployment of Portal applications
• Declarative security (same as to the mechanism found in Servlet and EJB specs)
• Architected to support remote execution of Portlets."

Java Community Process Org