Chapter 3. Portal Terminology

Kevin Barfield

Chris DeLashmutt

JBoss Portal is made up of portals, portal containers, portal pages, and portlets. What are these things? Here are some definitions:

Figure 3. Portal Definition Diagram.

Now let's look at that default portal page again with these terms in mind (Figure 4).

Figure 4. The default portal page with components highlighted.

Now we see that the default portal we are looking at has four portal pages, and the default portal page has three portlets on it (greetings, user, and content view). In addition, we see that each portlet window is made up of decorations/controls and a portlet fragment (the content view does not have any decoration/controls). Each portlet can represent some fragment of information that you want to present to users. By having multiple portlets on a portal page, we can aggregate information from the portlets into a single browser window.