Web Portals: Will WSRP make all the pain go away?
If you look in the nooks and crannies where I work you can plenty of Web Portal servers lurking. WebSphere Portal is a standard for many groups. However a group working on an Oracle platform would naturally gravitate to the Oracle Application Server Portal, for example. Certainly groups that are targeting the .NET platform are gravitating to SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Moreover since SharePoint Services is “free”, it has the tendency to grow like a weed. Not your application portfolio manager's greatest friend.
But wait a minute! OASIS has solved the problem for us! They've defined the Web Services for Remote Portlets standard and all the major portal server vendors have vowed support (see WSRP link). Here is Microsoft's press release promising support. Now all the portal servers' Portlets and WebParts can seamlessly talk to each other. Problem solved! Or is it?...
That Microsoft's current WSRP Consumer and Provider are GotDotNet workspaces, does not exactly engender the greatest confidence in their commitment to the spec. Moreover, this Usenet thread comment by Dino “Gimmesomathat” Chiesa, the MSFT PM for developer tools, makes me doubt that WSRP will ever rise to the level of “Product”, at Microsoft. His message? Use Web Services.
Does anyone think WSRP will actually work?