Intelligent Enterprise

Nathaniel Palmer Vice President & Chief Analyst
Delphi Group, Boston

WSRP is a communication protocol that allows 'portlets' (packaged content and/or computing capabilities) from one application to work within another (notably, but not only, portals). JSR 168 is a Java programmatic interface that lets Java-based portlets work within WSRP-compliant applications.

In the absence of these standards, any consuming application requires individual integration points to be hand-built between every application and information source. With WSRP and JSR 168, compliant portlets are transformed into fungible business objects that can be brought into many different applications and combined into various combinations of content and capabilities.

Thus, these standard protocols allow user-driven integration, while leaving content and information to be managed at its native source. Integration costs are reduced without jeopardizing the integrity of information and content repositories.

Repositories continue to be maintained by administrators, but resources they provide are accessible to nontechnical business users. These users can browse through libraries of content and information resources, bringing them into portals and other applications through 'plug-and-play' integration. These standards present the first real opportunity to reduce IT backlogs and deliver user-managed applications — what could arguably be called the most 'user-centric' advancement in business computing since Lotus 1-2-3.

Nate Root, Senior Analyst
Forrester Research, Cambridge, MA

Portal standards are important for portal vendors and their partners, not buyers. Until we had these standards, each portal server needed its own portlets to integrate each outside application, such as document management, CRM and ERP. Whether portal vendors or their partners built and maintained these portlets, there was a great deal of redundant development involved.

With JSR 168, back-end app vendors like Siebel, SAP and Documentum can build one set of portlets that plugs directly into any Java-based portal framework. Portal vendors win because they're excused from the burden of building portlets. Back-end app vendors win because they ensure a consistent user experience.

With WSRP, portlet developers don't have to custom code the user interface for different portal servers. But, as with JSR 168, this is valuable to portal vendors and their partners rather than buyers.

In the future, WSRP and JSR 168 should benefit customers in two ways. First, as the standards become adopted, portal developers will need less platform-specific training; their skills will become portable, making them easier to find and less expensive to hire. Second, as firms' portal strategies mature, they'll start to expose internal portal components — such as collaboration spaces and order-entry systems — to partners. JSR 168 will let companies share portlets by sending each other code; WSRP will let them share a centrally-hosted portlet.