Portal
- Manages the request/response to a portlet. Portal receives the request on behalf of a portlet, sends it to portlet and sends back the response to the user.
- Handles authentication of the users.
- Generates a document based on the fragments from the different portlets in the page. This is called content aggregation.
- Makes sure user is provided the content (Portlets) for which user is authorized. For example some users may not be authorized to view a portlet or edit a portlet and these are taken care of by the Portal.
Portlet Container
- Provides runtime environment and manages the Lifecycle of the Portlet like a Servlet container manages the lifecycle of a Servlet.
- Portlet container provides persistent storage for portlet preferences.
- Portlet container receives requests from Portal if a portlet needs to fulfill a request and the portlet container passes it on to required portlet.
- After obtaining the response from the Portlet, Portlet container sends the fragment of the portlet to the Portal for aggregation.
