Portal components and services are the main functional parts of a portal application. An application can contain any number of components and/or services.
A portal component produces output to be displayed in an iView of the portal. Content administrators create iViews from portal components deployed in the portal. For more information, see iViews.
The component can provide all the HTML for an iView, or can provide a fragment of HTML to be included within the HTML output of another component.
A portal component is tied to a specific HTTP request. The component is executed when a request is sent to the portal, and the component is listed in the URL. For more information about portal request URLs, see Portal URLs.
For more information about creating portal components, see Building Portal Components.
For more information about the portal components runtime execution, see How Requests Are Handled by Portal Runtime.
A portal service provides processing that is not bound to a specific request. A service can be called by a component or by other services.
The portal provides a number of built-in services, such as a user management service for controlling portal users and groups, or a service that enables client-side eventing between iViews. In your portal applications, you can create custom portal services to be used by your own and/or other applications.
For more information about creating portal services, see Building Portal Services.