What is a Pagelet?

Question

I've seen this term used quite a bit lately, in particular in conjunction with sites like FaceBook that load different areas of the page concurrently, calling the different areas of the page 'pagelets'. Is this actually a construct, a specific HTML tag, etc., or just a word to signify a logical area of a webpage that has no specific technical implementation?

Answer 1

The term "Pagelet" is used by a number of product vendors to signify some kind of markup (generally HTML) than can be injected into web pages, and managed as an independent component. Hava a look at http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/pagelet for a definition.

Pretty much any external web app or page fragment hosted external to the "containing" page could be called a pagelet - e.g weather "widgets", google maps etc. Some product (e.g. Oracle WebCenter Pagelet Producer) include a proxy server that allows pagelets to be created by clipping external apps, and also provide single-sign on, credential mapping, parameter passing and various types of filtering.