A portlet application is a web application that can contain multiple portlets. The portlets that are within the application can interact with each other when placed on the same Portal page. As with other EGL based web applications, portlet applications are composed of JSP files that are backed by JSF Handler parts and other configuration files. For more information regarding EGL web application development, see Building EGL JSF Web applications.
JSF Handlers for portlet applications are developed in exactly the same way as handlers for other web applications. In standard web applications, the JSF Handler part backs a JSP that represents an entire web page. In a portlet application, there is at least one JSF Handler and a corresponding JSP file for each supported mode of each portlet in the application.
When you use the New EGL Portlet wizard to create a portlet named MyPortlet, and specify that it will support view and edit modes, the wizard will create two JSF Handlers called MyPortletView and MyPortletEdit
Java™ Server Pages in a portlet application represent a fragment of a portal page. Unlike JSPs for standard web applications where each JSP represents an entire web page, each portlet JSP represents only the fragment of the portal page that is confined to the individual portlet window.
It is the responsibility of the portlet container to combine these fragments into a valid web page. For this reason, you must not add HTML markup head and body tags to your portlet JSPs.