Portlet Design Considerations

A portal is an application that aggregates portlets into pages and provides authentication, authorization and administration tools. A portlet is a single piece of portal content; it is the window through which users interact with the application while using a portal. Portlets provide information and act as gateways to full-blown applications. Portlets cannot communicate to one another, only to an application.

The principle value of a portlet to a user is that, compared to launching an application and searching for data manually, a portlet can significantly shorten the number of clicks required to get from the portal to the desired information or transaction.