Portlet Site Aims To Promote Interoperability, Fast Adoption

BEA Systems, Documentum, Sun Microsystems and Plumtree are backing the site and encouraging vendors and integrators to post portlets that comply with the emerging JCP JSR-168 and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standards.

The site is hosted by the independent SourceForge organization. The primary sponsors are posting a library of standard portlets and hope that others, including portal rivals such as IBM and Vignette, will follow suit.

The relevant companies had all been invited to participate, according to Nils Gillman, director of marketing at BEA, San Jose, Calif. An IBM spokesman said that was not the case, at least for IBM. "We were not invited," he said. Microsoft could not be reached for comment.

Members of the OASIS WSRP technical committee include the four sponsor companies mentioned above plus Citrix Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Reed Elsevier, SAP and Vignette.

These two emerging standards are viewed as critical to the continued propagation of portals. JSR-168 deals with "standardizing the presentation and preference model for Java-based portlets," Gillman said. "That means people creating portlets to run inside WebLogic or other Java-based portals, you can plug them into whatever portal."

WSRP addresses interoperability between networks and languages so support for that specification would mean a portlet installed on a portal in one part of the network can be called from anywhere.

Integrators supporting customer portals should find sample code and documentation they need on the site. "If you look at who does the most portlet development, it's the integrators. They're the ones building these custom applications and portlets," said Robert Duffner, senior director of portal products at BEA.