The Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification version 1.0 produced jointly by two OASIS technical committees has been approved as a Committee Specification. The specification has also been approved for advancement toward adoption as an OASIS Standard, and enters a 30-day public review period preliminary to its voting phase. The WSRP document has been created by members of the Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA) and Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) TCs. The goal of the specification "is to enable an application designer or administrator to pick from a rich choice of compliant remote content and application providers, and integrate them with just a few mouse clicks and no programming effort. Typical scenarios include portal servers providing portlets as presentation-oriented web services that can be used by aggregation engines, or portal servers consuming presentation-oriented web services provided by portal or nonportal content providers and integrating them into a portal framework. The design aim is to simplify the integration effort through a standard set of web service interfaces allowing integrating applications to quickly exploit new web services as they become available. The joint authoring of these interfaces by WSRP and WSIA TCs allows maximum reuse of presentation-oriented, interactive web services while allowing the consuming applications to access a much richer set of standardized web services."

Bibliographic Information

Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification. OASIS Committee Specification. Edited by Alan Kropp (Vignette Corporation) Carsten Leue (IBM Corporation), and Rich Thompson (IBM Corporation). Version 0.95. 24-April-2003. 86 pages. Document identifier: wsrp-specification-1.0. TC Locations: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsia and http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrp. Contributors: Chris Braun (Novell), Jeff Broberg (Novell), Mark Cassidy (Netegrity), Michael Freedman (Oracle Corporation), Timothy N. Jones (CrossWeave), Thomas Schaeck (IBM Corporation), and Gil Tayar (WebCollage).

WSRP Specification Abstract

"Integration of remote content and application logic into an End-User presentation has been a task requiring significant custom programming effort. Typically, vendors of aggregating applications, such as a portal, write special adapters for applications and content providers to accommodate the variety of different interfaces and protocols those providers use. The goal of this specification is to enable an application designer or administrator to pick from a rich choice of compliant remote content and application providers, and integrate them with just a few mouse clicks and no programming effort."

"This specification is a joint effort of two OASIS technical committees. Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA) and Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) aim to simplify the integration effort through a standard set of web service interfaces allowing integrating applications to quickly exploit new web services as they become available. The joint authoring of these interfaces by WSRP and WSIA allows maximum reuse of presentation-oriented, interactive web services while allowing the consuming applications to access a much richer set of standardized web services."

"This joint standard layers on top of the existing web services stack, utilizing existing web services standards and will leverage emerging web service standards (such as security) as they become available. The interfaces are defined using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL)."

WSRP Overview

Scenarios that motivate WSRP/WSIA functionality include:

• Portal servers providing portlets as presentation-oriented web services that can be used by aggregation engines.
• Portal servers consuming presentation-oriented web services provided by portal or nonportal content providers and integrating them into a portal framework.

However this description also applies to non-portal environments, mostly identified by the WSIA use cases.

This specification accounts for the fact that Producers (web services conforming to this specification) and Consumers (applications consuming Producers in a manner conforming to this specification) may be implemented on very different platforms, be it as a J2EE based web service, a web service implemented on Microsoft's .Net platform or a portlet published directly by a portal. Special attention has been taken to ensure this platform independence.

Portals and other Web applications render and aggregate information from different sources and provide it in a compact and easily consumable form to an End-User. Among typical sources of information are web services. Traditional data-oriented web services, however, require aggregating applications to provide specific presentation logic for each of these web services. Furthermore, each aggregating application communicates with each web service via its unique interface. This approach is not well suited to dynamic integration of business applications and content as a plug-and-play solution.

This specification solves this problem by introducing a presentation-oriented web service interface that allows the inclusion of and interaction with content from a web service. Such a presentation-oriented web service provides both application logic and presentation logic. This specification provides a common protocol and a set of interfaces for presentation-oriented web services. Thus, aggregating applications can easily adopt these web services by utilizing generic proxy code.

OASIS WSRP and WSIA Technical Committees

The aims of the WSRP TC are: "(1) 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. (2) To work closely with the OASIS WSIA technical committee (previously named the WSCM TC) to ensure reuse and compatibility where possible. (3) To 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. (4) Ultimately, to promote WSRP to the status of an international standard for the conduct of XML and Web Services based web application development, deployment and management."

"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." [adapted from the TC Charters]