Commerce Enabled Portal provides commerce function to be used with WebSphere Portal in the form of a generic portlet.
By defining different parameters for the generic portlet in the portlet deployment descriptor (the portlet.xml file), you can create concrete portlets. Instances of these concrete portlets are created at runtime. The portlets reside on the WebSphere Portal machine.
In order to provide commerce capability, you must define the WebSphere Commerce URL as a parameter for the portlet. These URLs are either a view command or a control command and correspond to an existing WebSphere Commerce URL. For example, to add a shopping cart to your portal, you define the view command for displaying the shopping cart as a parameter in the portlet deployment descriptor. The content of the portlets can be customized to use other functions available through WebSphere Commerce.
If the content of one Commerce Enabled Portal portlet relies on the content of another Commerce Enabled Portal portlet, Commerce Enabled Portal uses a feature called dynamic context to synchronize the content of the portlets. For more information, see Synchronized content through dynamic context.
Commerce Enabled Portal provides two sample portlet applications in the form of starter stores. A portlet application is the package of the generic portlet and all associated concrete portlets. For information about the sample portlet applications, see Commerce Enabled Portal samples.
For more detailed information about portlets, see the WebSphere Portal information center