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title: Overview
order: 1
layout: page
---

[[portal.overview]]
= Overview

Vaadin supports running UIs as portlets in a portal, as defined in the JSR-286
(Java Portlet API 2.0) standard. A portlet UI is defined just as a regular UI,
but deploying to a portal is somewhat different from deployment of regular web
applications, requiring special portlet descriptors, etc. Creating the portlet
project with the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse or a Maven archetype automatically
generates the necessary descriptors.

In addition to providing user interface through the Vaadin UI, portlets can
integrate with the portal to switch between portlet modes and process special
portal requests, such as actions and events.

While providing generic support for all portals implementing the standard,
Vaadin especially supports the Liferay portal and the needed portal-specific
configuration in this chapter is given for Liferay. Vaadin also has a special
Liferay IPC add-on to enable communication between portlets.



