Web Services Remote Portlets

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Web Services Remote Portlets

• Web Services Today Core Technologies and issues
• Winston Damarillo
• OASIS WSRP TC

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Overview
Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) has
defineda standard for interactive,
presentation-oriented web services.

• Companies Involved with WSRP
• BEA, Bowstreet, Citrix, Commerce One, Computer
  Associates, CrossWeave, Divine, Drake Certivo,
  Factiva, France Telecom, Fujitsu, Gluecode, HP,
  IBM, Interwoven, Kinzan, Lexis-Nexis, Lotus,
  MacDonald Bradley, Microsoft, Moravia IT,
  Netegrity, Novell, Oracle, Peoplesoft,
  Perficient, Plumtree, Reed Elsevier, SAP,
  SeeBeyond, Silverstream, Stellent, Sun
  Microsystems, Sybase, Tibco , Vignette,
  WebCollage

• WSRP defines
• A WSDL interface description for invocation of
  WSRP services
• Semantics for interacting with WSRP services that
  can not be expressed in WSDL.
• Markup fragment rules for markup emitted by WSRP
  services

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WSRP Motivation

• Enable the sharing of portlets (markup
  fragments) over the internet with a common
  interface
• gt Cross vendor publishing and consuming of
  content

Visual Component Pool ? Internet
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Presentation vs. Data Oriented WS
Data service
Presentation Service
100 101 96 100
100 101 96 100
100 101 96 100
100 101 96 100
100 101 96 100
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WS
Presentation Layer
Presentation Layer
WS
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Actors in a WSRP World

• Portlet A particular configuration of a
  component that renders its state in markup.
• Producer The service provider hosting the remote
  interactive Web service (for example, weather.com
  as a weather service provider)
• Consumer Integrates the remote service into its
  Web application, oftentimes using a portal
  toolkit (for example, Yahoo Weather or a
  corporate portal)
• End User The person that comes to the Consumers
  Web site to use the Producers application in the
  Consumers context

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Scenario Use of WSRP in Portals
WSRP Consumer
WSRP Producer
WSRP Service
Portal
WSRP Service
WSRP Service
Aggregated HTML, WML, VoiceXML, ... over HTTP
Mark-Up Fragments Transferred via SOAP

• Portals can aggregate presentation from many WSRP
  services
• WSRP services can be aware of portal context
• User profile from portal
• Desired locale and markup-type
• Active user agent

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Scenario Portal sharing Portlets
WSRP Consumer
WSRP Producer
Portals
Server Portal
Portlet
WSRP Interface
Portals
Portals
Portal
Portlet
Portlet
Huge number of users
Portals as Intermediaries, Caching offloads
requests from WSRP Producer
Publishing Portal

• Users of the second portal (WSRP Consumer) can
  select remote portlets like any local portlet and
  put them on their pages
• In this case, the portal providing a portlet as a
  WSRP service adheres to the WSRP protocol and
  contracts just like any other WSRP Producer
  service

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Scenario Use of WSRP in Client Apps
WSRP Consumer
WSRP Producer
WSRP Service
Application (e.g. Word, Outlook, ...)
WSRP Service
WSRP Service
User Info, Actions, Markup Fragments Transferred
via SOAP
Rendering within client applications view

• Applications may embed WSRP Services through
  plugin mechanisms, e.g. COM Components or ActiveX
  Controls
• In this case, the plugin in the client
  application adheres to the WSRP protocol and
  contracts as a WSRP Consumer

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WSRP and Portlet API(s)
Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP)
Platform Independent Web Service Interface
Java Portlet API (JSR 168)
C Portlet API (.NET)
Platform specific, local Portlet APIs
WSRP Impl. on plain J2EE or .NET platform
. . .
Portlet APIs may be defined for different
programming languages WSRP can bridge between
the different platforms, leveraging platform
independence of Web services Goal Portlets
written to Portlet API(s) can be published as
WSRP services
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WSRP TC Areas of Work

• Business Scenarios
• WSRP Interfaces Protocol
• WSRP Markup Fragments Rules/Styles
• WSRP and Security, Identity, SSO ...
• WSRP Interoperability
• WSRP Conformance
• WSRP Publish, Find, Bind Metadata (not in v1.0)
• WSRP Coordination (not in v1.0)

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Planned WSRP Milestones

• September 2003 WSRP Specification 1.0 approved
  as an OASIS standard
• December 2003 Determine content of WSRP v1.1
• May 2004 WSRP Specification 1.1 approved as
  an OASIS standard
• September 2004 Determine content of WSRP v2.0

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Useful links

• http//www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrp - TC
  public page
• http//ws.apache.org/wsrp4j/ - Open source
  Producer project
• http//jakarta.apache.org/pluto/ - Open source
  Portlet container project
• http//www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/wsrptk -
  Evolving test kit for WSRP conformance. This
  builds on the Eclipse testing framework.
• http//www.eclipse.org/wsvt/ - Eclipse testing
  framework.