
One of the new features introduced in the WAS V6.1 is the Portlet Container. What this means is , the application server now has a dedicated container that can host portlets. Though the container will provide a limited set of services.
The Portlet container has a simple portal framework, provided by the PortletServingServlet servlet. The PortletServingServlet servlet registers itself for each Web application that contains portlets. Now one can use the PortletServingServlet servlet to directly render a portlet into a full browser page by a URL request and invoke each portlet by its context root and name.
One can deploy portlet war files like any normal web application. The portlet can be invoked directly through a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to display its content without a portal aggregation.
Portlets can be aggregated on a JSP page by using an aggregation tag library.
This development will lead to a rethink on the use of Portal Servers. Application, which are not doing small pieces of content aggregation and are not using the Portal Server features, need not go through the whole Portal Server investment.
One can start with a vanilla portal application and as the application grows , the Portal Server features like Colloboration, Search, Aggregation, Integration will start coming into picture. At that time, all the investment made in developing Portlets on the WAS V6.1 can be reused without any changes and the upgradation to the full blown Portal Server becomes easy.
(The picture is from WAS V6.2 Infocenter)