Oasis Adopts Web Services Standard For Portals

Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) 1.0 was approved by a 25-member technical committee of Oasis, which stands for the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. The panel includes several major high-tech vendors, such as IBM, BEA Systems, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Sun Microsystems,

WSRP defines how an application providing stock market information, for example, can be plugged into a portal--an Internet-based user interface--for displaying data and accessing applications. Portals can be for internal use within a company or can front consumer businesses such as Yahoo and America Online.

From a technical standpoint, WSPR uses Web Services Description Language to describe the application's interface, and requires Simple Object Access Protocol as the communications mechanism. Both standards are under the control of the World Wide Web Consortium, another major standards body, and are key technologies within Web services, an umbrella term for a set of specifications for connecting applications over the Internet.

Applications consumed by portals are called portlets, which often run on remote computers. WSRP promises to eliminate the need for a developer to write code specifically for the platform running the portlet, which means it shouldn't matter whether the application is running on a J2EE or Microsoft .Net server. Portlets could even be published in a public directory, where developers could get the information needed to access the service.

Despite the obvious advantages to using WSRP, portal and software vendors haven't promoted the technology in their product lines, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at market researcher ZapThink LLC.

"In part, this is because WSRP must also take advantage of the security, management, and (business) process specifications that are currently being worked on by the other standards and specification creation bodies," Schmelzer said. "Our guess is that WSRP will really take off once these underlying specifications are well established and implemented."

WSRP is expected to have an affect on the portal market. As portlets become interchangeable, customers will focus less on the platform and proprietary technology of portal products, and more on ease of use, developer support, and on the software's ability to handle application and data integration, security and management, Schmelzer said.

"Given that, I think we can expect to see greater portal (vendor) consolidation in the short-term, not just due to WSRP, but due to the fact that the portal is increasingly becoming a core part of the IT infrastructure," Schmelzer said.