PORTALS, PORTLETS and WSRP

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PORTALS, PORTLETS and WSRP
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Outline of the presentation

• What is portal?
• What is portlet?
• What is WSRP?
• A portal architecture using WSRP
• WSRP - Detailed

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Portals

• Provide personalized access to information,
  applications, processes and people.
• Get information from local or remote data
  sources, e.g. from databases, or remote web
  sites.
• Aggregate information into composite pages to
  provide information to users in a compact and
  easily consumable form.

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Portals (Cont.)

• Includes applications like e-mail, calendar,
  organizers, banking, bill presentment, etc.
• User profile management, e.g. Different views for
  different user.

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Outline of the presentation

• What is portal?
• What is portlet?
• What is WSRP?
• A portal architecture using WSRP
• WSRP - Detailed

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Portlets

• Different rendering and selection mechanisms for
  different kinds of information or applications.
• Portlets are plugging components, which provides
  an abstraction to hide differences.
• Portlets are user-facing, interactive web
  application components rendering markup fragments
  to be aggregated and displayed by the portal.

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Portlets

• Content is provided
• by external services and displayed by specific
  local portlets running on the portal.
• by local portlets using only local portlets.

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Problems with Portlets

• This approach is not well suited to enable
  dynamic integration of business applications and
  information sources into portals
• The process of making new portlets available is
  tedious and expensive.
• The presentation layer has to be redeveloped for
  each portal.

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Problems with Portlet (Cont.)

• Web services may include application and
  presentation layer and themselves produce markup
  fragments.
• Now easy to aggregate at the consuming portal.
• This solution is WSRP.

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Outline of the presentation

• What is portal?
• What is portlet?
• What is WSRP?
• A portal architecture using WSRP
• WSRP - Detailed

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WSRP

• Web Services for Remote Portals are user-facing,
  interactive web services including presentation.
• Easy to aggregate and can be invoked through a
  common interface using generic portlet proxy code
  that is built into the portal.
• No special portlet code needs to be installed on
  the portal at all, re-implementation of the
  presentation layer on each portal is avoided.

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WSRP

• WSRP defines
• A WSDL interface description for invocation of
  WSRP services
• How to Publish, Find, Bind WSRP services and
  metadata
• Markup Fragment Rules for markup emitted by WSRP
  services
• Applicable Security Mechanisms

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Outline of the presentation

• What is portal?
• What is portlet?
• What is WSRP?
• A portal architecture using WSRP
• WSRP - Detailed

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A portal architecture using WSRP
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A portal architecture using WSRP (Cont)
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A portal architecture using WSRP (Cont)

• WSRP definitions can be published and found, and
  bound through UDDI registres.
• The following attributes are used to describe
  WSRP in UDDI
• T-model ID
• Service Name
• Supported locales
• Service Titles
• Service Descriptions
• Supported Modes
• Supported Markups
• Cachability
• Instance awareness
• Keywords
• Supported View States
• Allowed modifications

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A portal architecture using WSRP
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Outline of the presentation

• What is portal?
• What is portlet?
• What is WSRP?
• A portal architecture using WSRP
• WSRP - Detailed

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WSRP

• WSRP is a specification, based on SOAP.
• Defines SOAP operations that enable a Web Service
  to return an HTML fragment that can be embedded
  in another HTML page.
• The users perception is of a small Web
  application embedded inside another HTML.

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WSRP

• Producer The Web Service that return the HTML
  fragments and acts as a mini application.
• Consumer The HTML page (or application) that
  embeds the Producer mini application.
• End user The end user, who via the browser, sees
  the two combined applications.

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WSRP

• Portlet Entity is a customization of the basic
  portlet, which is bound to only one web service.
• If producer provides this customized portlet
  entity, it is Producer Offered Portlet Entity
  (usually this is unique).
• The Consumer can also create customizations of
  Portlet Entities to create Consumer Configured
  Portlet Entities.

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WSRP - Interfaces

• Markup an interface which includes operations
  that enable the embedding of the Producer HTML
  inside the Consumer.
• Service Description an interface which includes
  an operation that enable the Consumer to query
  the Producer about its entities.
• Portlet Entity Management an interface which
  includes operations that enable the Consumer to
  customize entities
• Registration an interface which includes
  operations that enable the Consumer to register
  itself with the Producer.

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WSRP Markup Interface

• getMarkup this operation is invoked by the
  Consumer in order to get the current HTML,
  which will be embedded in the Consumer page.
• performInteraction/performBlockingInteraction
  this operation is invoked by the Consumer after
  the end user interacted with the Producer HTML in
  the combined Consumer page (SeeEnd user
  interactions).
• initCookie this operation helps Producers which
  use HTTP cookies in their operations.

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WSRP - End User Interactions

• interaction URLs links in the Producer which
  point to the Consumer in order to perform an
  interaction.
• interaction parameters the information which is
  passed to the Consumer in the interaction URLs.
• Two methods to insert interaction parameters
• Producer URL-Writing
• Consumer URL-Writing
• navigationalState giving getMarkup a
  navigationalState will return an HTML fragment
  that this navigationalState references.

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WSRP - End User Interactions
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WSRP Service Description Interface

• getServiceDescription returns a description of
  the Producer. This information is also called the
  Producer metadata and the Portlet meta-data

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WSRP - Portlet Entity Management Interface

• getPortletEntityPropertyDescription returns the
  list of properties available for a Portlet
  Entity, including their names, types, and human
  readable titles.
• setPortletEntityProperties sets the property
  values of entities, in effect customizing them.
• getPortletEntityProperties gets the property
  values of entities.

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WSRP - Portlet Entity Management Interface (Cont.)

• destroyPortletEntities destroys a previously
  created Consumer Configured Portlet Entity.
• getPortletEntityDescription returns a
  description of a whole Portlet Entity.
• clonePortletEntity clones an entity to create a
  new Consumer Configured Portlet Entity.

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WSRP - Registration Interface

• register register the Consumer at the Producer.
• deregister the inverse operation, which enables
  the Consumer to end its relationship with the
  Producer.
• modifyRegistration enables the Consumer to
  notify the Producer of changes in the data the
  Consumer sent in the previous register operation.

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WSRP Producer Example -1

• getServiceDescription Logic

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WSRP - Producer Examples 1 (Cont.)

• getMarkup Logic

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WSRP - Producer Examples - 2

• getServiceDescription Logic

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WSRP - Producer Examples 2 (Cont.)

• getMarkup Logic

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WSRP - Producer Examples 2 (Cont.)

• getMarkup Logic