Basically it had a render_portlet URL which could force an individual portlet to re-render it's information on a screen without doing a full F5 style page refresh. Does Jetspeed have anything similar?
I think that you can implement a similar functionality using the first approach suggested to Jan, but that I still haven't try it. Use this url: http://<host:port>/<jetspeed>/portlet/page.psml?entity=<portletentityid> where page.psml is your psml page (with your portlet) and entity is your portlet entity id, passing it your parameters (or no one if this is the default action of the portlet). The http response should contain the new html generated markup, then using a Javascript callback you can replace the portlet content using this new html markup. Maybe, in the next future, we should implement something similar. I'll post my solution.