A Portlet container runs portlets and provides them with the required runtime environment. A portlet container contains portlets and manages their life cycles. It also provides persistent storage mechanisms for the portlet preferences. A portlet container receives requests from the portal to execute requests on the portlets hosted by it. A portlet container is not responsible for aggregating the content produced by the portlets; the portal itself handles aggregation. A portal and a portlet container can be built together as a single component of an application suite or as two separate components of a portal application.
