| Last Updated: | June 5, 2003 |
| Status: | Draft (1.3) |
| Version: | PDK Release 2 (9.0.5 and later) |
Organizations that are engaged in enterprise portal projects find application integration to be a major issue. Until now, users have had to develop portlets using proprietary APIs for a single portal platform and often are faced with a limited number of available portlets from a particular portal vendor. All this changes with the introduction of the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and Java Specification Request (JSR 168) standards. These two standards enable development of portlets that can be interoperable on different portal products and therefore increases the availability of portlets to an organization. This, in turn, can dramatically increase an organization's productivity when building enterprise portals.
WSRP is a web services standard that allows the plug-n-play of visual, user-facing web services with portals or other intermediary web applications. Being a standard, WSRP enables interoperability between a standards enabled container and any WSRP portal. WSRP defines:
JSR 168 is a specification that defines a set of APIs to enable interoperability between portlets and portals, addressing the areas of aggregation, personalization, presentation, and security. JSR 168 defines:
The Oracle9iAS Portal development team is actively participating
in
the WSRP committee and is also a member of the expert group for JSR 168.
Oracle is committed to supporting these standards and is working on a production
release of a WSRP-enabled portal. Today, OTN (Oracle Technology Network)
members can view a hosted a pre-release
version of the WSRP portal and verify interoperability of their
own WSRP-enabled portlets. On
this hosted portal, users can also view a set of WSRP sample portlets, register a
provider (also known as producer), and add portlets to a page. Once the
JSR 168 APIs are public, developers will be able to download a JSR 168 PDK and begin
building portlets that can be registered and tested on the site. This PDK
will include a JSR 168 portlet wizard that simplifies portlet development and
simultaneously reduces the learning curve for these new APIs.
So, what is the relationship between WSRP and JSR 168? WSRP is a communication protocol between portal servers and portlet containers, while JSR 168 is a Java API for portlets to work with WSRP portals. This API enables developers to integrate their applications from any internal / external content as portlets with WSRP portals. Building portal pages becomes as simple as selecting portlets from the Oracle9iAS Portal repository. The illustration below shows the architecture of the WSRP specification.
Since Oracle's existing architecture is so similar to the one specified by the WSRP committee, Oracle9iAS Portal is able to support communication between our portal and both the new JSR 168 APIs as well as our existing PDK APIs (JPDK). The illustration below shows the architecture of Oracle's WSRP portal. Notice that the JSR 168 portlet container uses the WSRP protocol for communication and the JPDK portlet container uses Oracle's proprietary protocol for communication.
Web Services Remote
Provider
Java Specification Request
168
Web
Services Description Language
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration
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