What is the difference between a portal and a portlet?
A portal is a web site that acts as hub, gateway or window to other information and services on the Web. Common Web portals are Yahoo, Netscape, etc. A portlet is a specialised content area that occupies a small window of a portal page. Portlets from different sources (Portlet Providers) can be integrated into the portal framework. Example portlets: weather info, news flashes, stock tickers, etc.
A portlet is a highly focused channel of information served up by a portal. A portal can contain many of these information channels. For example, an online retail portal could provide a variety of interactive merchandise portlets, each presenting a different specialty category such as mystery books, classical music CDs, and baseball memorabilia.Unlike a static portal page, the deployment of portlets via the Personalization Server gives our online retailer the ability to dynamically respond to customers based on profiles. With this technology, not only can the retailer provide dynamic content, but also the customer can easily select and arrange their e-Commerce portlets. For example, a returning customer, Samantha, who loves mystery novels and ghost stories could select the “mystery” portlet as central to her standard view of the retailer’s home page. This would be done by means of an edit page made available by the retailer. At the same time, the retailer could determine that Sam’s pur
