Chapter 1. Introducing portals and portlets
Figure 1.1. The iGoogle home page containing portlets that show information from different sources: CNN, YouTube, Gmail, and so on. The portlets display the most relevant content and provide limited features to the user, in contrast to full-fledged web applications.
Figure 1.2. Portals aggregate content from different information sources. The portlets on the iGoogle portal page generate content for the page by retrieving information from the CNN, YouTube, and Gmail applications.
Figure 1.3. In this scenario, the user interacts with multiple web applications to access content. A separate web application exists to access content from each of the distinct sources of information.
Figure 1.4. The organization’s intranet makes it easy for users to access different web applications by redirecting users to the original web applications. In this scenario, the user is still interacting with individual web applications for information and services.
Figure 1.5. The organization’s intranet portal gathers content from different data sources, which means that users don’t need to access different web applications for information or services. In figure 1.4, the intranet website simply redirected users to the original web applications, but when using portals, the user is taken to the original web application only if little-accessed information or services are requested by the user.