(September 17, 2003) - OASIS members have approved Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. WSRP standardizes the consumption of Web services in portal front ends, as well as the way in which content providers write Web services for portals.

"WSRP defines how Web services plug into portals," explained Delphi President, Thomas Koulopoulos. "Once a WSRP service is published to a public directory, portal administrators are able to locate and dynamically integrate it with just a few mouse clicks. WSRP is a critical standard enabling distributed portals to share portlets as visual, user-facing Web services for integration with other portals."

"As a co-author and a leader of the WSRP and JSR 168 initiatives, IBM is very glad to see that WSRP has been approved by OASIS as a formal standard. IBM, through WebSphere Portal, will be enabled to integrate WSRP services offered by any WSRP-compliant producer and to publish portlets running on WebSphere Portal as WSRP services," said Larry Bowden, vice president of Portals and Lotus products for IBM. "To push for the quick adoption of the WSRP OASIS Standard by providers of content and application services, IBM provides a free, open source implementation of WSRP based on Tomcat and the Java Portlet API (JSR 168) Reference Implementation at the Apache Software Foundation - WSRP4J (http://ws.apache.org/wsrp4j/), enabling third parties to implement WSRP services by implementing JSR 168 portlets and making them available as WSRP services which will plug into all WSRP-compliant portals."

WSRP eliminates the need for content aggregators to choose between locally hosting a content source or writing code specific to each remote content source. Instead, WSRP allows content to be hosted in the environment most suitable for its execution while still being easily accessed by content aggregators. The standard enables content producers to maintain control over the code that formats the presentation of their content. By reducing the cost for aggregators to access their content, WSRP increases the rate at which content sources may be easily integrated into pages for end-users.

"The OASIS WSRP Technical Committee was founded in early 2002 with the vision of providing a single interface standard for all interactive, presentation-oriented Web services. WSRP v1.0 succeeds in providing this platform neutral definition of an interface," said Rich Thompson of IBM, chair of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee. "Early vendor support for WSRP -- we've tracked eight implementations to date -- clearly demonstrates the need for this standardized means of accessing remote content."

WSRP allows remote portlet Web services to be implemented in a variety of ways, including Java/J2EE and Microsoft's .NET platform. WSRP is the result of a collaboration of 25 OASIS member companies.