handling components

If I have a seaside component and want to make it a page in pier, how do I do that? What if I want to make it a part of a page? I have a feeling the pier way is much different. Judging by how PRDistribution sets things up, it looks as if components are wrapped in PRComponent and have a component class. But I've been unable to see where actual rendering happens, or where state goes. The concrete problem motivating these questions is that I want to display a list of files whose name match a certain pattern in a certain directory. The pattern and the directory could be hardcoded, but it would be more interesting if they were editable in the web. This will display a list of the files; if you click on one of them you will see it. That sounds like a job for PRFile, though again I'm not exactly sure how that gets hooked in. This is all likely to get more complex as I extract relations between files, parse the contents of the files and show information based on the parse. But for now I'm just working on the "simple" stuff. Any hints? Thanks. Ross