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What is the JBoss Portlet Bridge?

The JBoss Portlet Bridge (or JBPB for short) is an implementation of the JSR-301 specification which supports JSF within a portlet and with added enhancements to support other web frameworks (such as Seam and RichFaces). It basically allows any Java developer to get started quickly with their JSF web application running in a portal environment. The developer no longer needs to worry about the underlying portlet development, portlet concepts, or the API.

Understanding how JSF works with Portal

The portlet bridge isn't a portlet. It's the mediator between the two environments and allows JSF and Portal to be completely unaware of each other and live in their own seperate worlds. The bridge is used to execute Faces requests on behalf of the portlet. During each request, the Faces environment is setup and handled by the bridge. Part of this implementation acts as a Faces controller much as the FacesServlet does in the direct client request world. The other part of this implementation is provided by implementating a variety of (standard) Faces extensions.