New OASIS Standard to Galvanize a Fragmented Portal Market

WSRP Version 1.0 eases integration of remote information into portals

Members of the OASIS Internet standards body unanimously approved the Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) 1.0 specification this September in a move that is expected to make it easier and cheaper for enterprise architects to build meaningful user interfaces into corporate data.

Developed jointly by major application server vendors and enterprise application providers, the WSRP specification picks up where basic Web services protocols like SOAP and WSDL leave off, defining standards for including presentation and user interaction notations within remote services. These definitions relieve portal developers of having to write and host presentation code for each service, or "portlet," they access.

"WSRP is reaching the portal market at a time when it is ripe for standards," wrote Gartner research director Ray Valdes in a recent report. "Currently, the portal market is doubly fragmented — from a technology perspective (that is, every portal vendor has a proprietary portlet API) and a market perspective (that is, the sector is crowded and many players have roughly equivalent market shares)."

Proponents of WSRP hope that the specification will eliminate this fragmentation by providing a standard way for portlets to transmit look-and-feel information along with data. With such standardization, the home page of a sales force extranet site, for instance, could access a portlet hosted on the company's internal application server to determine not only the latest sales figures but also whether those figures should appear in black or red; at the same time, it could access a portlet that shows the contents of the sales rep's Microsoft Exchange inbox and delineate new messages in bold.

While both services could be built with existing technology, developers would have to write extra code to format the response data. They would also have to deal with the different access methods provided by each service.

"This effort is geared toward ensuring that portals or other aggregating intermediaries are able to incorporate interactive presentation from UI components regardless of the vendor platform hosting them," says IBM's Rich Thompson, chair of the OASIS WSRP technical committee. "WSRP does this by leveraging the emerging Web services infrastructure to expose these UI components and also defines the semantics of what it means to interact with these components in a compliant manner."

While Thompson is confident that the current version of WSRP will prove beneficial to many companies, he notes that there are still some areas that the committee responsible for the standard would like to work on. "There were a number of areas that the Technical Committee chose to defer considering in the version 1.0 specification due to factors such as the immaturity of related standards, time needed to reach consensus on more advanced functionality, and just the overall resource available to the committee," says Thompson.

Examples of items now being worked on include: additional markup types such as VoiceXML, Wireless Markup Language (WML), and Compact HTML (cHTML); use of registries for discovery of WSRP services; and message-level security. Thompson did not say when the new features would be added to the specification.

In the meantime, many vendors of application servers and portal software are expected to move forward with version 1.0 of the WSRP specification and are working on product updates. Already, Vignette has announced that it will add WSRP support to its Vignette Application Portal package sometime during the first half of 2004. Interwoven and Documentum have also made similar announcements.

— Amit Asaravala

Amit Asaravala is a freelance information technology journalist based in San Francisco.

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