Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) version 1.0 has been passed by the consortium as a standard to connect sources of portal content – such as real-time news, stock quotes, etc – via Web services. Around twenty-five OASIS member companies, including IBM Corp, Microsoft Corp and Vignette Corp, drove development of the standard.
The real benefit of WSRP is to remove the requirement for content aggregators to host a content source at the location of the portal server or write different code for each remote content source. Rather, WSRP lets developers write portlets (discrete content-driven portal applications) in popular Web services authoring environments – using Java/J2EE or Microsoft’s .NET – without forcing them to (re)write code for each proprietary portal.
It takes cost issues out of the equation…plus you also have the ability to get [content] out to a much larger audience quickly, Rich Thompson, chairman of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee, was quoted as saying.
Most of the leading portal vendors are rallying around WSRP. San Francisco, California-based Plumtree Software Inc has readied its own WSRP portal offering and other vendors are looking to achieve similar compatibility with the new standard. Thompson also noted there are also signs of interest from the Apache open source community.
Ultimately, WSRP standard is just one of many standards portal developers need. OASIS has been working in parallel on another standard called JSR 168 (Java Specification Request) which aims to deliver inter-operability across different vendors’ portlets. The creation of this standard however is being hampered by the lack of other supporting standards in search and retrieval, content management, and directories (user) management.
Source: ComputerWire
