A standard from OASIS called Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is used to allow portlets to be decoupled from a portal. It allows portlets, which are deployed to remote portal servers, to be aggregated at runtime into a unified portal page by a local portal server. The remote portal server's portlets are wrapped as Web Services. The output of a Web Service operation is an HTML fragment used by the portal to render the portlet. Interestingly enough, the portal server software used to manage remote portlets and the portal can differ, provided they both conform to the WSRP specification. In this two-part article, we'll examine this capability and show how two competing portal server products, namely WebSphere Portal and WebLogic Portal, can integrate with one another. Using WSRP is one step forward to building a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

In this first article, we'll introduce portlet, WSRP, and related Java Specification Requests (JSR). From there, we'll explore the consumption of a WebSphere portlet by WebLogic Portal. In the second article, we'll examine the reverse scenario with WebSphere Portal consuming and WebLogic operating as the portlet producer.