Portlet Container

The Portlet Container is an extension of the servlet container. As such, a portlet container can be built on top of an existing servlet container or it may implement all the functionality of a servlet container. Regardless of how a portlet container is implemented, its runtime environment is assumed to support at least Servlet Specification 2.4.

A portlet container receives requests from the portal to execute requests on the portlets hosted by it. If you are familiar with servlet, you can easily understand portlet by correlate lifecycle methods of portlet and servlet.

The portlet lifecycle methods such as init(), render(), processAction(), processEvent(), serveResource() and destroy() are managed by Portlet Container. Portlet container is responsible for :

• Loading class of portlet.
• Creating and maintaining the portlet instance.
• Initializing the Portlet.
• Submitting user request to portlet instance.
• Destroying portlet instance when it is undeployed.
• Provides persistent storage for portlet preferences.