Thanks to Oracle colleague Jake Kuramoto, I just learned about a product Oracle is in the process of acquiring that has some connection to the whole portlets/widgets discussion. Apparently, BEA has this product called Ensemble that can (among other things) take any web page and turn it into a “pagelet” (which is kinda like a widget). Just insert a tag into the page on the app where you want to pull in said pagelet and you’re done. See here (about 6 minutes into the video).