Combination of JavaFX and Portlet 2.0 technologies make it possible to develop portlets that can live outside of a portal page and outside of a browser and run as desktop applications. JavaFX can be used to develop very rich UI, thus can be used as client-side presentation technology. JavaFX also allows to add drag-n-drop feature to applets running inside a browser. Portlets on the other hand can execute the business logic and talk to the enterprise data services, behind the firewall, thus adding security. And most importantly, portlets allow the user to save the personal preferences on the portal.
The portlet implements serveResource method. The portlet view jsp includes the JavaFX widget and passes the resoruce url as an applet param. The widget makes a serve resource call and gets a JSON object from the portlet and paints the scene. After dragging onto the desktop, when asked to save, it uses jnlp persistence to save the resource url as a muffin, so next time it is invoked it can use the same url. If user wants to be remembered and be able to access the resource url without being asked for authentication again, then the remember-me and other cookies can also be saved as muffins. This is what is done in this proof of concept.
http://blogs.sun.com/pdblog/resource/amphibiousPortlets.html