1. A method for providing data to portlets comprising: registering a plurality of portlets to determine a type of data required by the portlets, wherein the registering establishes a portlet context for handling future data requests for the portlets; determining a type of information associated with one of the portlets; initializing a data acquisition process to obtain the determined type of information from a data source; receiving a data request for data of the determined type from the associated portlet; acquiring data from the data source using the initialized process; and responding to the data request using the acquired data.