Planning for WSRP

Before you work with WSRP, plan your configuration based on the following information.

IBM® WebSphere® Portal Version 8.0 supports both WSRP Version 1.0 and 2.0.

How WSRP is implemented in the portal

The WSRP implementation in WebSphere Portal Version 8.0 enables you to do the following with your portal:
For Producer portals:
A WSRP Producer portal can provide portlets as WSRP services for remote invocation by Consumers. Depending on the API version of the provided portlet, the WSRP Producer provides the portlet in different WSRP protocol versions. JSR 168 portlets and IBM API portlets (also called IBM legacy portlets) are provided via both WSRP V 1.0 and V 2.0.    JSR 286 portlets can be provided via WSRP V 2.0 only. The following table shows which provided portlets on a WSRP Producer are available in which WSRP version:
API to which the portlet complies Provided by WSRP V 1.0 Provided by WSRP V 2.0
JSR 168 standard API       X       X
JSR 286 standard API JSR 286 portlets cannot be provided by WSRP V 1.0.       X
IBM portlet API (legacy portlets)       X       X
For Consumer portals:
A WSRP Consumer portal can integrate WSRP services that are provided by Producers as remote portlets. On the Consumer portal these portlets behave like local portlets that comply with the standard portlet API, independent of their implementation on the Producer side - by the standard portlet API, the IBM portlet API, .NET, or other implementations.

A WSRP Consumer portal can integrate WSRP services that are provided by WSRP V 1.0 or WSRP V 2.0 Producer portals. Consumer portals support WRSP V 2.0 and can therefore consume all three types of portlets: JSR 168, JSR 286, and IBM portlet API.

Note: At this time the WSRP Producer implementation in the portal does not support the Registration interface of the WSRP specification. This interface is optional. However, the Consumer portal can handle Producers that support WSRP registration interfaces.

Prerequisites for WSRP in the portal

If you want to use WSRP with your portal, you must have the appropriate level of IBM WebSphere Application Server installed. Refer to WebSphere Portal detailed system requirements to determine the WebSphere Application Server version that is required by your version of WebSphere Portal.

Exchanging the information required for WSRP

Before Producer and Consumer portals can communicate for using WSRP, the Producer needs to provide the information that the Consumer needs to consume the WSRP services from the Producer. This includes information about the following:
  • The location where the Consumer can find the service description document of the Producer.
  • The configuration of the Producer portal. This includes the security setup for WSRP on the Producer portal.

WSRP markup caching

The WSRP implementation in the portal uses expiry-based markup caching for remote portlets to improve performance. This reduces the number of interactions between the Consumer and the Producer and enables the use of remote caches for pages containing remote portlets.

For more information about markup caching refer to the topic about WSRP markup caching.