What is WSRP?
The Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) specification defines the Web services interfaces and semantics for interactive, presentation-oriented content services. This allows the content consumers, such as portals, to access conformant services without requiring service-
specific code.
How does WSRP benefit content aggregators, such as portals?
WSRP eliminates the need for content aggregators to choose between locally hosting a content source or writing code specific to each remote content source. Rather, WSRP allows content to be hosted in the environment most sensible for its execution while still being easily accessed by content aggregators.
How does WSRP benefit content producers?
WSRP enables content producers to maintain control over the code that formats the presentation of their content. This reduces the distribution of updates problem frequently faced today. In addition, by reducing the cost for content aggregators to access their content, WSRP increases the rate at which content sources may be easily integrated into pages for end-users.
What is the status of WSRP?
WSRP was submitted to the OASIS membership on 1 August 2003 for consideration as an OASIS Standard. At least six vendors have indicated they have implementations underway and will participate in the interoperability testing the OASIS WSRP TC is supporting. The OASIS WSRP TC is beginning work on follow-on versions which will add more advanced features (e.g., cross-portlet coordination).
How does WSRP relate to other Web services standards?
WSRP seeks to leverage Web services standards as they are widely available in Web stacks. WSRP v1 uses WSDL to describe the interfaces, requires at least SOAP bindings be provided to all conformant services, defines the passed message structures using XML Schema and uses XML to carry the messages between the services and their clients. Future versions are exploring emerging standards in the areas of attachments and security, among others.
How does WSRP relate to other portlet-oriented work?
Since WSRP was developed in parallel with the effort by the Java community to standardize a portlet API, care has been taken to align these two new standards with each other. In addition, care has been taken to ensure WSRP can be easily supported on a .NET platform. One example of how these efforts relate to developers is that vendors have indicated that portlets developed to the new Java Portlet API will not need to be aware that they may be accessed remotely using the WSRP protocol, but rather it is a feature of the hosting container to provide such access as if it had occurred locally.
