Web Services for Remote Portlets

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Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is a standard for content aggregators, such as Web portals, to access and display content sources (i.e. portlets) that are hosted on a remote server. WSRP is a technology agnostic protocol designed for accessing remote Portlets in a standard manner. The WSRP specification defines a web-service interface for interacting with interactive presentation-oriented web services. Initial work was produced through the joint efforts of the Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA) and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) OASIS Technical Committees. With the approval of WSRP v1 as an OASIS standard in September, 2003, these two Technical Committees merged and continued the work as the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) OASIS Technical Committee.

Scenarios that motivate WSRP/WSIA functionality include:

content hosts, such as portal servers, providing portlets as presentation-oriented web services that can be used by aggregation engines;
content aggregators, such as portal servers, consuming presentation-oriented web services provided by portal or non-portal content providers and integrating them into a portal framework.

Contrary to first impressions, JSR 168 and WSRP are not competing technologies as they address different aspects of portlet functionality. In the simplest terms, JSR 168 is a technology specific (Java) Portlet API designed to enable interoperability between Java portlets and Java portlet containers. These portlets are "local" to the container in which they are managed. WSRP is a technology agnostic protocol designed for accessing remote Portlets in a standard manner. These two are not orthogonal, but rather parallel. WSRP does not make any statements as to how the protocol should be implemented, and interoperability between JSR 168 based implementations and .NET implementations has been demonstrated. These two specifications can be (and frequently are) used together with JSR 168 defining a portlet and WSRP remoting that Portlet to remote containers/consumers.

WSRP v1 provided a base platform for interoperable publishing and consumption of remote portlets. WSRP v2 is extending that platform to provide cross-portlet coordination, among other features. This targets additional use cases related to the WSRP Consumer integrating multiple content sources, regardless of whether they are local or remote, into a new web application. WSRP v2 began a public review in June 2006 with an intent to become an OASIS standard by the end of 2006.