Marc Logemann has asked in his blog [LINK] "Is WSRP Dead?", a question prompted by Marc’s failure to find wsrp producers on the web.

Judging by the responses at TheServerSide.net [LINK] it would seem the answer is unfortunately no.

If you look at the spec though it’s pretty blatantly obvious to me that the real answer is it was never alive!!!

WSRP stands for Web Service for Remote Portlets. It lets you share a portlet hosted in a portal with other portals based on configuration alone.

The host (WSRP producer) instantiates the portlet and then serializes it into XML, including HTML and wraps the whole thing in SOAP. It also does things like URL re-writing to avoid collisions with the consumer. It even does things like re-writing the javascript.

It’s a super lazy approach and the problems are numerous:

a) The size of the data packet over the wire: Includes Presentation and Data combined.
b) Have to layer security on top of it. Can flow security contexts over in some cases but generally you’ll want to do WS-Security over SOAP. Now you’re really bloated.
c) Context: The portlet think’s it’s running on it’s host portal, can’t interact with other portlets on the screen as it doesn’t know where it’s being hosted.
d) Things like Ajax or javascript-ish controls are going to be tough to debug.
e) Performance: All that stuff on the wire.
f) Additional processing for stuff like Request.Redirect to strip out HTTP headers.

The list goes on and on and yet this spec is on V2.0 now!!! I don’t understand it but there you have it. With things like JSON/REST/SOAP and the ease by which you can create a UI nowadays you’d think folks’d wise up, take the hit and build a native portlet to consume a data web service. You’re life will be so much easier in the long run and you’ll get better mileage from the data web service than you will from WSRP web services.
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