In a single GateIn Portal instance as well as in a GateIn Portal cluster, portal applications can be organized on two levels of granularity:

• Portal Container

• Site

Portal Containers represent the coarsest granularity. A Portal Container can host multiple Sites. Both Sites and Portal Containers have a unique identifier assigned to them which can be found in the default URL mapping according to the following scheme: http://localhost:8080/<portalcontainer>/<site>

A Site is comprised of a set of pages, navigation definitions, and can be assigned a unique skin.

When creating a portal based web, it is possible to either (a) create a Portal Container from scratch or (b) extend an existing one, e.g. the one available at http://localhost:8080/portal of the default GateIn Portal installation.

Option (b) is the recommended way. By creating a Portal Extension you can benefit from the default portal provided by GateIn Portal and be able to customize the parts you want. The benefit over directly modifying the shipped files is that it will make the updates much easier (by just replacing the archives provided by GateIn Portal).

While running multiple portal containers is possible, it is usually better to keep them on separate installations. Multiple Sites in a single Portal Container are mostly enough to achieve the desired diversity.

The mechanism used for creating Portal Containers from scratch and for extending existing Portal Containers is fairly the same: One creates an Enterprise Archive (EAR) containing some configuration, runnable code and static resources. Please refer to the next chapter where we describe the process in detail for Portal Extensions.