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Portlets

We realize that many of you require eCommerce functionality integrated within your portal server or Content Management System. For this reason we have integrated KonaKart with some popular products that support the JSR 168 portlet specification. We currently have out of the box support for:

  • Apache Jetspeed Portal
  • Liferay Portal (store front app and admin app)

The portlets can be created by running an Ant task once the Community Edition of KonaKart has been downloaded and installed. Full instructions can be found in the on line documentation. A KonaKart portlet may also function correctly in other portals supporting JSR 168 although these haven’t been tested.


An OpenCMS integration module is also available, showing how the KonaKart SOAP APIs can be called from within OpenCMS to provide a seamless integration.

What is a portlet ?

Just in case you are new to portlets, here’s a short article with a brief explanation.


Portlets are Web-based components managed by portlet containers that supply dynamic content. Portals employ portlets as pluggable user-interface components—a presentation layer—for information systems. The Java Portlet Specification achieves interoperability among portlets and portals by defining the APIs for portlets and by standardizing the rules for preferences, user data, portlet requests and responses, deployment, packaging, and security. Java Portlet Specification 1.0, Java Specification Request (JSR) 168, was released in October 2003.


In the pre-JSR 168 days, you had to develop and maintain a separate version of your portlet that complied with the vendor-specific portlet API for each and every vendor portal. The related tasks were time-consuming, aggravating, and cumbersome. Moreover, to the detriment of the end users, ISVs, developers, and vendors, that scenario meant that only a limited number of applications were available through only a few portals.


JSR 168 brought a world of a difference: By adhering to the standards, you can build portlets that can run in portals, irrespective of their vendors. Hence, no more hassles with the requirements that vary according to vendors. That’s a win-win situation for all.