Portlets via Web Services

Our Portal Manager makes it possible to use portlets provided by web services. The Portal Manager accesses these remote portlets by means of HTTP requests to the server that runs them.

The communication between the servers is based on the WSRP specification (Web Services for Remote Portlets). Commonly, the remote server is a JSR168 portal server. The party that uses portlets offered by a web service is called consumer, the party that provides them is the producer.

Thus, WSRP creates a common platform for remote portal functionality. By using the Portal Manager as a WSRP consumer, portlets running on other systems such as IBM Websphere Portal Server can be utilized.

Requirements

From version 6.5.1, the Portal Manager, which is included in CMS Fiona, can be used as a WSRP 1.0 consumer.

The following requirements must be met to be able to use remote portlets in conjunction with the Portal Manager:

• A portal server must exist that offers remote portlets in accordance with the WSRP 1.0 specification and that serves as a producer.
• The portlets offered via web services must be present on the portal server.
• The Portal Manager and the producer must be able to communicate with each other via HTTP/HTTPS.
• The WSDL file describing the service as well as all the schemes and name spaces included in it must be accessible to the Portal Manager even if they are located on remote servers.
• The URL of the WSDL file for this service must be known.

  Example:
  http://portalstandards.oracle.com/portletapp/portlets?WSDL

Restrictions

Although a WSRP specification exists, some vendors might have included proprietary features in their products. Currently, the Portal Manager does not support proprietary features.

The Portal Manager offers an implementation of the WSRP 1.0 specification, except for the following features:

• Producer Mediated Sharing (CookieProtocol:perGroup) is not supported.
• Anchors (wsrp-fragmentID) are not supported.