Experiences with WSRP Testing

and Development
Xiaobo Yang, Xiao Dong Wang and Rob Allan

CCLRC e-Science Centre

Daresbury Laboratory

18th January 2006, Portsmouth, UK

 Overview

• What and why WSRP?

• WSRP support test of selected open-
source portal frameworks
• Development of WSRP consumer for
Sakai
• Conclusion remarks

Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 What is WSRP?

• WSRP ( Web Services for Remote Portlets )

– An OASIS standard to solve the interoperability issue between
portal frameworks
– Defines presentation-based and interactive Web Services
Web
Web
Web
Web
Web WSRP
Portals
Web
Web
Web Clients
Clients
Clients Portals
Portals WSRP
Portals
Web
WebClients
Clients Portals
Portals Portals
Services
WSRP
Portals
Clients
Clients Portals Portals
Services
Clients
Clients
Clients Services

e.g.

Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Why WSRP?

• Why WSRP
– Plug and play using Web services
– Deploy service once, reuse anywhere
– Reuse both business logic and presentation
– Avoids multiple copies of code
– Integrate third-party portlets from remote servers
– Transparent to end users and portal administrators
– Allows local maintenance and content aggregation
– Look and feel consistent even from remote portlets

Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
WSRP Test of Selected Open-
Source Portal Frameworks
 Who Supports WSRP?
• Open-Source Community Portal Frameworks
– eXo Platform v1.0
– Liferay Enterprise/ Professional v3.6.1
– StringBeans v3.0
– uPortal v2.4 (soon to be v3.0)
– Sakai v2.1.0
– WSRP4J
– …

• Commercial Vendors
– BEA WebLogic Portal v8.1
– IBM WebSphere Portal Enable/ Extend for Multiplatforms v5.1
– Sun One Portal v6.2
– …

• All support WSRP Consumer and Producer, except uPortal v2.4 only has
WSRP Consumer support and Sakai v2.1.0 only has Producer

Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Why Investigation?

• WSRP support is confusing

– WSRP consumer support without producer, e.g. uPortal v2.4
– WSRP producer support without consumer, e.g. wsrp4j + pluto,
Sakai v2.1.0
– WSRP consumer and producer, e.g. eXo v1.0, Liferay
Enterprise/Professional v3.6.1, StringBeans v3.0
• Do they inter-operate?
• Investigate is based on our previous experience in portal framework
evaluation
– Interoperability issue between different portal frameworks
– Ease of use
– Functionality
– Stability
– Security
– …
Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Investigation Scenarios

• Popular Portal frameworks selected as used to support e-

Research
– eXo platform v1.0
– Liferay professional v3.6.1
– StringBeans v3.0
– uPortal v2.4.2 Aimsto
Aims totest
testall
allcombinations!
combinations!
– WSRP4J (CVS download)

• Test portlets selected

– HelloWorld portlet
• Text input box, button, text message feedback, javascript
URL, view/help/edit mode
– LdapBrowser portlet
• Portlet URL, image URL
Presenter
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Workshop
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2006, Portsmouth, UK
 HelloWorld Portlet

view mode edit mode

help mode buttonVRE

“Submit” clicked
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 Test Results
• Producer: WSRP4J
– Consumer: eXo platform
• Able to list remote portlets
• No edit mode support
• HelloWorld portlet works fine
• LdapBrowser portlet only works for first query, further query through portlet URL or image
URL does not work, image was not displayed
– Consumer: Liferay
• Able to list remote portlets
• Edit mode is functional
• Help mode doesn’t work – blank screen
• HelloWorld and LdapBrowser portlets work fine
• Image is not displayed
– Consumer: StringBeans
• Able to list remote portlets
• No action can be taken
• Server must be restarted when a new producer is created
– Consumer: uPortal
• Unable to list remote portlets
• Portlet handle must be defined to publish a remote portlet
• Can not go back to view mode after entering edit or help mode
• Both portlets work fine
• Image was not displayed

Presenter
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Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Test Results (continued)

• Producer: eXo Platform

– Consumer: eXo platform
• Same as WSRP4J acting as producer
– Consumer: Liferay
• Fails to connect to eXo producer
• Reason: SOAP message shows Liferay fails to execute the
getServiceDescription( ) operation
– Consumer: StringBeans
• Able to list remote portlets with markupURL and
serviceDescriptionURL defined plus registration handle
(extracted from eXo to eXo SOAP message) provided
• No action can be taken
– Consumer: uPortal
• Fails to connected to eXo producer
• Reason: remote portlet handle can not be defined
Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Test Results (continued)

• Producer: Liferay
– Consumer: eXo platform
• Fails to retrieve remote portlet list although a producer is created
– Consumer: Liferay
• Able to list remote portlets but all items are empty
• The markup fragment of HelloWorld and LdapBrowser portlet
can be retrieved and displayed but no action can be taken
– Consumer: StringBeans
• Able to list remote portlets
• No action can be taken
• Always displays the default page
– Consumer: uPortal
• Using the portlet handle hidden in the portlet list, uPortal can
load the default view page but no action can be performed
Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Test Results (continued)
• Producer: StringBeans
– Consumer: eXo platform
• Able to list remote portlets
• Can get markup fragment of the HelloWorld and LdapBrowser portlets
• Different modes can be switched but no action is replied correctly
– Consumer: Liferay
• Able to list remote portlets
• HelloWorld and LdapBrowser portlet can be displayed but no action is
responded correctly, the same page is always displayed
– Consumer: StringBeans
• Able to list remote portlets
• HelloWorld portlet works fine except sometimes buttons are not correctly
handled
• LdapBrowser portlet behaves similar to eXo to eXo, i.e., portlet URL and
image URL does not work
– Consumer: uPortal
• Fails to connected to StringBeans producer
• Portlet handle can not be defined

Presenter
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Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Display Images

Relative image URLs replaced by absolute URLs in uPortal’s consumer

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 Summary
• WSRP implementation is still at an early stage, further development is
clearly needed
• Producer comparison:
– WSRP4J producer can be accessed by all selected WSRP consumers
– eXo platform producer is accepted by eXo and StringBeans (with
careful settings)
– Liferay producer is far away from being mature since none of the
consumers connected to it is functional
– StringBeans producer is only functional with another StringBeans portal
consuming it
• Consumer comparison:
– None of the consumers is fully functional
– eXo platform consumer has no edit mode support and has problems
handling portlet/image URLs
– Liferay consumer has problem in supporting help mode
– StringBeans consumer does not work with producers other than
StringBeans. Also it has problem handling portlet/image URLs. Each
time a new producer is defined, server must be restarted
– uPortal consumer needs portlet handler to publish a channel

Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Test Summary
Based on the above results:

Producer eXo Liferay StringBeans uPortal WSRP4J

Platform
Consumer
eXo Platform
   

Liferay
   

StringBeans
   

uPortal
   
Nothingisisfully
Nothing fullyfunctional!
functional!
Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
Development of WSRP
Consumer for Sakai
 Requirements

• A lot of portlets are now available to use, how to integrate them into the
Sakai framework?
– A set of Grid portlets developed for the NGS Portal
– Sakai VRE Demonstrator has some communication portlets
– Portlets come from portal frameworks
– Open-source community

• We want to make use of both business logic and presentation layer

– Re-write presentation layer is time-consuming

Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 WSRP Interfaces

• WSRP 1.0 defines four interfaces

– ServiceDescription: a required interface provides meta-data for a
consumer to interact with each portlet the producer hosts. It also
gives information about the producer’s capabilities.

– Markup: a required interface for interacting with user requests and

generating markup fragments.

– Registration: an optional interface to set up a relationship between a

producer and a consumer.

– PortletManagement: an optional interface used for both managing the

life-cycle of hosted portlets and portlets’ persistent state.

Presenter
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Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 WSRP Sequence Flow

End-User Consumer Producer

End-User visits Consumer to access a portlet

handled by Producer
Consumer looks up Producer’s metadata (unregistered)
Producer provides its metadata to Consumer
(unregistered)
Consumer registers itself with registration properties Register
Producer returns registration context (unique to the
Consumer)
Consumer looks up Producer’s metadata (registered)
Producer provides its metadata to Consumer (registered)

Consumer asks for markup

Producer returns markup of the portlet

Rewrite

Markup presented to end-user

User submits a form from the portlet
Collect form data

performBlockingInteraction with form data Process form data

Navigational state and/or new mode and/or window
state
Consumer asks for markup with navigational state, mode
and window
Producer returns markup of the portlet

Rewrite

Markup presented to end-user

Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Development of WSRP Consumer

• WSRP consumer is a broker sitting between producer and client

– User interactions must be re-directed to producer as consumer is not
responsible for handling such interactions
• A Web-based WSRP consumer has been developed and tested with
WSRP4J producer
– Developed as a Java servlet on top of WSRP4J consumer
(ProxyPortlet)
– Four interfaces implemented
– UDDI registration tested
• Portlet and producer’s information published in UDDI
• Client queries UDDI registry to get a list of portlets meet its
requirement
• Client selects a portlet which in turn calls the WSRP consumer

Presenter
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2006, Portsmouth, UK
UDDI for Portlet & Producer Registration

Presenter
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FileTransfer Portlet Running in Sakai

Presenter
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 Issues

• Security
– How to authenticate client?
– How to apply authorisation policy?
– How to make use of UDDI efficiently?
– …
• Inter-portlet communication
– Will WSRP 2.0 solve the issue?
• Customisation
– Provides contents according to client’s capability
• WSRP client needs to be a real broker
– How to support file upload/download
• Interoperable?
– WSRP consumers from different vendors have a lot of issues talking
to WSRP producers provided by other vendors
Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Summary

• Based on WSRP4J, a WSRP consumer has been written for Sakai to

integrate existing portlets

• UDDI registry has been explored to store portlet and producer

information

• There are many issues to be solved (?WSRP 2.0)

Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
 Conclusion Remarks

• WSRP makes it possible for VREs to easily integrate existing portlets

• UDDI can be utilised to store portlet and producer’s information

• There are still many issues with WSRP – interoperability and security are
two biggest issues (Will WSRP 2.0 solve these issues?)

• Interoperability must be solved so that consumers can access producers

provided by different vendors

• Security is needed to protect remote portlets

Presenter
VRE Developers Name
Workshop
18th JanuaryFacility Name
2006, Portsmouth, UK
Questions?

Thank you!

Presenter
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2006, Portsmouth, UK