Investigation of WSRP support in selected open-source portal frameworks

WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) is a promising web services specification used to standardise presentation-based access to remote web portal content. In combination with the JSR 168 standard, portlet developers are freed of doing the hard work in publishing their portlets to remote portal – ideally it is the duty of portal framework to publish the portlets it manages. Code-reusability can now be achieved with JSR 168 while ”deploy once” is achieved through WSRP. In this paper the WSRP support provided by selected open-source portal frameworks including eXo platform, Liferay, StringBeans and uPortal are reported. WSRP4J, which is not a portal framework but a reference implementation of the WSRP 1.0 specification, is also discussed. Based on our test results, a WSRP consumer has been developed for Sakai, a collaboration and learning environment, based on the WSRP4J consumer, which enables Sakai to consume JSR 168 portlets.