Question

In an interview today I mentioned that I had done some jsf work in a portlet. The interviewer asked for specifics on what the portlet-bridge does. I never looked into it all that much, just used it because I was told it would make jsf work in the portlet. All I could really say was that it allowed the requests to come from the portal to jsf in a way jsf would understand, and made it play nice.

What exactly does the portlet-bridge do?

Answer 1

From the spec linked by Jeremy Walton above.

2.1 What is a Portlet Bridge?

The Java™ Portlet Specification
defines a set of APIs for directly
implementing a portlet. A portlet
bridge is a technology used by a
portlet to bridge to an execution
environment where differing
abstractions are used for rendering
markup or processing user
interactions. Typically these are
well-known, possibly standard web
development environments. Examples
include JavaServer™ Faces and Apache
Struts.

The portlet bridge acts as the
translation engine between the portlet
environment and the targeted system.
It expresses the portlet request
context to the bridged environment,
executes the request and transforms
the response as appropriate for the
portlet environment. It provides an
abstraction of the portlet environment
for the bridged environment, and for
developers working within the bridged
environment. These developers are
freed to execute Faces views as
portlets, without the need to
understand the details of the portlet
APIs and development model.

To put it simply, a portlet bridge is
the technology that allows a Java web
developer to execute views developed
using other web programming
abstractions as portlets without
needing to know and or learn about
portlet development, concepts, or
APIs.

The Portlet Bridge for JavaServer™
Faces is the specific bridge
technology needed to support this
bridging behavior for JavaServer™
Faces.