A Common API for Accessing Portlet Repositories

Posted by Scott Delap on Oct 13, 2006

Sections

Operations & Infrastructure,

Development

Topics

Java ,

Portlets ,

Languages ,

Programming ,

Portal/CMS

This week Roy Russo announced the creation of the Portlet Repository Protocol (PRP) which seeks to create a common web service API that can be used to communicate with portlet repositories. This would allow any portal vendor to browser repositories and download/update portlets like developers currently do when browsing/installing/updating plugins for their IDE of choice.

Current participants include:

• Sun Java System Portal Server
• JBoss Portal
• PortletSwap.com
• OS Portlet Repository Project

The protocol will work as follows:

• 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 choose to either install or update existing deployed portlets from one or many repositories.
• Installaton/Updating functions are implementation details left up to the specific portal vendor.

For more on portlets see InfoQ's past coverage of the business case for Portlets.

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   Ummm

   by Noah Campbell

   ...it's called UDDI. Why reinvent the wheel?

   Reply