What is a portal / portlet?

Hi,
I keep hearing these 2 buzzwords, portal and portlet? Can anyone give a description of what these things are or a link? I did a search on Google, but surprisingly did not find anything but tool vendors.
many thanks,
Barry

Hi,
Portlets are web components -like Servlets- specifically designed to be aggregated in the context of a composite page. Usually, many Portlets are invoked to in the single request of a Portal page. Each Portlet produces a fragment of markup that it s combined with the markup of other Portlets, all within the Portal page markup.

For details, have a look at
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168

-Amol

Ok, so I think I understand what it is, but how is it used. Can someone give an example of a real life application of this technology. Thanks!

Barry

If you are a returning customer at Amazon or you have signed up for particular news items at Yahoo, you are using a portal. The page you see is generated on the fly based on what the site knows about you.

MyYahoo is a good example, where you identify the content you want to see, then it is retrieved from the various sources you selected.
Check here for a good overview of one popular portal vendor.

http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/ias/doc_library/1021doc_otn/portal.102/a87567/basics.htm#1005271