About Portlet Projects

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A portlet is a web application that accesses and displays information from multiple sources, such as web services or applications. Multiple portlets can be combined on a single portal page when deployed to a production portlet container. Different instances of the same portlet can display data customized for each user.

Portlets use the following modes to determine what to display depending on what the user is doing.

• View. The View mode generates the portlet page with which the user interacts initially. View mode is the default mode.
   
  
• Edit. The Edit mode enables users to customize the behavior of the portlet, such as by changing portlet preferences.
   
  
• Help. The Help mode displays information about the portlet.
   
  

When you create a portlet project, the IDE creates a JSR-168-compliant JavaServer Faces Portlet Project. The portlet project is very similar to the JavaServer Faces Web Application project except the end product will be a portlet application. The design time experience for a portlet project is almost identical to a JSF Web Application with a few additional features such as setting the initial page for a portlet mode and editing the portlet deployment descriptor. Just like a JSF Web Application project, with a JSR-168 Portlet project you can manage, build, deploy, and test the items in the portlet. You can create and test portlets in the IDE, and then you can deploy them to the built-in portlet container.

See Also

Portlet Project Tasks: Quick Reference

Working With Portlet Projects