Portlets

This document introduces portlets and discusses their key characteristics. Portlets are self-contained components that can be placed on web pages and portals to provide modular functionality like weather, feeds, etc. They run in a portlet container on top of the servlet API and provide modes and states. The standard portlet API lacks MVC and data binding capabilities, which frameworks like Spring Portlet address. Best practices include treating portlets as view-only technologies and separating business logic into services.