Although not as widespread as some wished them to be 10 years ago, portals are still common enough to be a target of choice for Vaadin web applications.
Portal, container, and portlet
Before going further, one has to understand some essential notions about what a portal is and how it is constituted.
Three different concepts are each attached to a different granularity level.
- Portlet: A portlet is a pluggable software component, meant to be displayed inside a portal. As opposed to a servlet, a portlet only generates a part of the rendered page. If we liken it to a wall, a portlet would be a brick.
- Portal: A portal is a full-fledged application that aggregates portlets. Most portals will also allow administrators (or individual users) to customize ...