What is portlet container support in WAS

Starting from WAS 6.1, the application servers ships with JSR 168 compliant portlet container, this container is common component for both Websphere portal server and WebSphere application server. Websphere portal leverages the portalet container and extends its capabilities.

With the new portlet container in Application Server, you have two portlet containers from which to choose:

• The portlet container in Application Server provides base capabilities such as the JSR 168 Portlet API.


• The portlet container in WebSphere Portal extends these capabilities with additional features such as property broker events, portlet services events, and other capabilities.

Therefore, if you develop a portlet on top of Application Server, it will run on WebSphere Portal. The converse is not necessarily true; if you create a portlet which uses features of WebSphere Portal not supported by the Application Server portlet container, then it will not run on Application Server. However, you can write the code in such a way that it allows for a seamless degradation of functionality

You can use portlets deployed in Portlet Container of WAS in either of two ways

• URLAddressability: URLAddressability enables directly accessing and rendering of a portlet in a browser page, without decorations, by a simple URL request. You can invoke a portlet by its context root and name, exactly the same way that you can invoke servlets. Example: http://localhost:9080/portlets/HelloWorld


• Aggregation: Aggregation is supported through a Java Server Page tag library. The tag library provides basic capabilities which can be easily applied and used to aggregate multiple portlets on a page.