Part 1. Getting started with portlet development

Developing a web portal requires understanding the challenges it addresses—challenges that can’t be addressed by a group of distinct web applications. Also, web portals require certain distinctive features, and your choice of technology plays a crucial role in how easily you can develop a web portal.

In this part of the book, you’ll learn the basics of web portals and Java portlet technology. As you progress through these chapters, you’ll discover how portlet technology simplifies the development of web portals. Java portlets are deployed in a portlet container, which is similar to a servlet container, so a substantial portion of this part of the book focuses on the portlet container’s features and how you can use them to implement your portlets. Toward the end of this part, you’ll develop a real-world web portal example to get a feel for web portals.