What you see is what you get

Content syndication is currently a common practice to enrich the offerings of a portal. Yahoo is currently a good example of this approach: most of Yahoo features come from other web sites, including travel, weather, maps, or searching services delivered by Google. All Yahoo does is nicely aggregate these outputs together. A similar approach can now be followed for fully-fledged web applications, the portlets.

Using portlets, a portal web site can be created very simply by arranging the portlets into columns and rows, and minimize, maximize, or customize to suit their individual needs.

The portlets are normally fully independent applications, which can be acceptable unless some level of interoperability between the various portal portlets is needed. For ensuring portlet interoperability, the WSRP standard has been created.

Read more in deliverable D3.1.

– Tomas Dulik