A proposal has been submitted to OASIS for a new Web Services Remote Portal Technical Committee. To be chaired by Thomas Schaeck of IBM, the WSRP TC proposes to "create an XML and web services standard that will allow for the 'plug-n-play' of: portals, other intermediary web applications that aggregate content, and applications from disparate sources. These so-called Remote Portlet Web services will be designed to enable businesses to provide content or applications in a form that does not require any manual content or application-specific adaptation by consuming applications. The group would harmonize WSRP as far as practical with existing web application programming models (e.g., Portals/Portlets, Macromedia Flash, ...), with the work of the W3C (e.g., XForms, DOM, XML Events, XPath, XLink, XML Component API task force), emerging web services standards (e.g., SOAP, WSDL, WSFL) and with the work of other appropriate business information bodies." Based upon the proposed specification(s), portals would be able "to consume Remote Portlet Web Services, using generic Portlet Proxies to allow to dynamically plug in any Remote Portlet Web Service; portals would be able to publish any local portlet as a Remote Portlet Web Service, and Remote Portlet Web Services could be implemented on any Web services-capable platform."

Proposed TC deliverables: "The primary deliverable of the WSRP TC is specification that consists of a coordinated set of Web Services interfaces and technical contracts that will allow businesses to: (1) Implement Remote Portlet Web Services according to the spec to that they are interoperable with compliant consuming applications, e.g., portals. (2) Publish Remote Portlet Web Services into UDDI directories with meta-information that indicates their capabilities (3) Implement consuming applications according to the spec so that they are interoperable with compliant Remote Portlet Web Services. (4) Find Remote Portlet Web Services in UDDI directories and exploit the associated meta-information to determine their capabilities."

TC Proposers: The following persons were participants in the initial proposal: Brian Pearson, Bowstreet; Ed Anuff, Epicentric; Thomas Schaeck, IBM; Sasha Aickin, Plumtree; David Sean Taylor, IONA; Una Kearns, Documentum; Jon Klein, Lexis-Nexis; Jeff Broberg, Silverstream; Nigel Ratcliffe, Factiva; Michael Freedman, Oracle; Michael Hyman, Netegrity; and Mark Cassidy, Netegrity. Terms for TC participation are presented in the 'Call For Participation'.

From the IBM Note: "Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) are visual, user-facing web services centric components that plug-n-play with portals or other intermediary web applications that aggregate content or applications from different sources. They are designed to enable businesses to provide content or applications in a form that does not require any manual content- or application-specific adaptation by consuming intermediary applications. As Web Services for Remote Portals include presentation, service providers determine how their content and applications are visualized for end-users and to which degree adaptation, transcoding, translation etc may be allowed. WSRP services can be published into public or corporate service directories (UDDI) where they can easily be found by intermediary applications that want to display their content. Web application deployment vendors can wrap and adapt their middleware for use in WSRP-compliant services. Vendors of intermediary applicatios can enable their products for consuming Web Services for Remote Portals. Using WSRP, portals can easily integrate content and applications from many internal and external content providers. The portal administrator simply picks the desired services from a list and integrates them, no programmers are required to tie new content and applications into the portal. To accomplish these goals, the WSRP standard defines a web services interface description using WSDL and all the semantics and behavior that web services and consuming applications must comply with in order to be pluggable as well as the meta-information that has to be provided when publishing WSRP services into UDDI directories. The standard allows WSRP services to be implemented in very different ways, be it as a Java/J2EE based web service, a web service implemented on Microsoft's .NET platform or a portlet published as a WSRP Service by a portal. The standard enables use of generic adapter code to plug in any WSRP service into intermediary applications rather than requiring specific proxy code. WSRP services are WSIA component services built on standard technologies including SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL. WSRP adds several context elements including user profile, information about the client device, locale and desired markup language passed to them in SOAP requests. A set of operations and contracts are defined that enable WSRP plug-n-play..."

Related note: The OASIS Web Services Component Model (WSCM) TC voted to change its name and clarify its charter. The name has been changed to 'Web Services for Interactive Applications' (WSIA). The charter has been slightly revised to the following: "The purpose of the OASIS Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA) TC is to create an XML and web services centric framework for interactive web applications; harmonize WSIA as far as practical with existing web application programming models, with the work of the W3C, emerging web services standards, and with the work of other appropriate business information bodies; ensure that WSIA applications can be deployed on any tier on the network and remain target device and output markup neutral; and promote WSIA to the status of an international standard for the conduct of XML and Web Services based web application development, deployment and management." Mailing lists are wsia@lists.oasis-open.org and wsia-comment@lists.oasis-open.org.