Coupling RDF/RSS and WSRP for Dynamic Reusable Portlets: An Approach and a Use Case

Abstract

The need for cost-effective platform independent means of application invocation has fuelled technologies like Web services. Web services technology has found its application in a number of interesting ways, one of them being in creation of universal interoperable remote portlets. Web services for remote portlets (WSRP) is a standard that allows aggregator applications to consume remote portlets based on Web services interfaces. XML vocabularies like RSS (really simple syndication) or domain specific syndication syntactic frameworks allow for creation of raw data that can understood by a wide range of consuming portals and Web sites. Usually individual aggregators consume these raw data feeds and render it in some required UI (user interface) format. This approach requires that every single aggregator have a custom rendering application for generation of user specific UI, leading to considerable replication of effort. We take a wholistic view of the problem statement and propose an end to end architectural approach that combines usage of WSRP along with XML syndication feeds like RSS for creation of standards based, customizable, and dynamically generated reusable UI that can be consumed by aggregators like portals