A new protocol that talks with portlet repositories

October 18, 2006

Various concepts for a Web services repository protocol came after a few discussions with Sun Microsystems over the interoperability of disparate portlet repositories that lack any kind of industry standards. With many portal vendors, this is actually a growing problem.

In an effort to solve that problem, some industry experts say that in creating a Web-Service-based API that would allow any portal vendor to browse repositories, view individual portlet meta-data, and be able to download and update portlets from any repository, then we could be one step closer to overall standardization.

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The standard itself isn't a specification at the JCP. It is an open standard, so that anyone may take part and voice their opinions in its future development. What this means to portal administrators, is that one day they will be able to install/update/demo portlets from a myriad of repositories from within their own portal.

It also means the portlet world will get a lot smaller, in view, as where those portlets are coming from is transparent to the user. The Portlet Repository Protocol (PRP) project seeks to define a common Web Service API used to communicate with portlet repositories.

It will also establish the format and meta-data to be included when defining a specific portlet within a repository. This is a free and open standards project, that any portlet repository may implement, and any portal vendor may leverage, as well.

How the Portlet Repository Protocol (PRP) Works

The idea behind the PRP is simple: create a standardized method to retrieve a portlet's meta-data and the portlet binary data from an online repository. (The diagram below explains how the concept could work in practice).

A client portal communicates, via the PRP, to one or many portlet repositories. The meta-data returned, should be displayed in human-readable format to the end-user/portal-administrator.

The end-user/portal-administrator can then decide to either install or update existing deployed portlets from one or other repositories. Installation or updating functions are implementation details left up to the specific portal vendor.

The process-flow above should be well-known to IDE developers and is very similar to installing or upgrading various plug-ins within an IDE (Eclipse, IDEA, etc).

PRP is very similar in functionality to that of a plug-in installer/updater, with the exception that it is meant for portlets. Thereby lending a portlet container to be enhanced in a pluggable manner.

Source: Web Services.org

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