Understanding WSRP

This section tries to capture some the the basic WSRP concepts and helps user under and user OpenPortal^? WSRP binary, This is a work in progress document. Feel free to send your comments to user@wsrp.dev.java.net alias

1.0 WSRP Registration :

Registration is used to build a technical or business relationship between the consumer and the producer. Registration is optional i.e. its upto the producer administration to decide whether he wants consumers to register with this producer or not.

Any producer that does not supported registration is referred to as "Registration-less Producer"

1.1 Registration less producer:

In OpenPortal^? WSRP if you create a registration less producer , All the portlets offered by this Producer are readonly portlets i.e The users of the consumer portal can see these portlets but cannot change portlet preferences i.e they cannot persist any state on the portlet

For registration enabled producers the OpenPortal^? WSRP implementation allows user of the consumer portal to save/persist data.

1.2 Registration enabled Producer:

If a Producer supports registration then there are 2 ways in which it can support registration

1.2.1 Inband registration

In in-band registration, The producer allows the consumer to register with itself during the consumer creation process or in other words the registration happens within the WSRP Protocol. Here is a sample case

• A consumer administrator discovers or has a WSRP Producer URL -- he know nothing about this producer
• He tries to create a WSRP Consumer using this WSRP WSDL.
• The WSRP Consumer identifies that this Producer requires registration.
• The WSRP Consumer registers with the Producer inband i.e it invokes the register() command on the producer giving all the details about itself ( like portlet mode it supports, window states etc)

Note : A producer admin can optionally configure the Producer to request additional parameters from the consumer. For eg : Say the producer admin says -- Ask the consumer for

• Zipcode of the consumer
• Email of consumer admin

The above are called registration properties.

So when the consumer tries to register with the above producer -- It'll provide a GUI to the consumer admin saying -- Hey this producer needs these 2 information which I don't have .. Pls fill in these details and uses the details provided by the consumer admin to register with the producer.

1.2.2 Out of band registration

In this type of registration, even though the Consumer admin knows the Producer URL, he cannot register with the producer by using the WSRP Protocol as the above case.

He needs to contact the administrator of the producer portal offline ( phone or email) and ask the producer admin to create a registration for him, The producer admin creates a consumer registration and shares the registration handle ( string that represents a consumer regrations) with the consumer admin offline ( via the email, phone or whatever means ).

Upon receiving the registration handle the consumer admin creates a consumer using that registration handle. The OpenPortal^? WSRP Consumer and Producer admin portlets supports all the above mentioned configurations and provide necessary steps to configure them

-- Main.t_rajesh - 22 Aug 2008