Introduction to Web Services for Remote Portlets

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Introduction to Web Services for Remote Portlets

Untill now Service Oriented Arhitecture, UDDI or WSDL have been only buzzwords to me.

Imagine a web portal - this blog, for example. There small modules on the right showing few last blog items, favorite links and other stuff. These can be called 'portlets' (portal applets). If wanted to add there something like a weather report, where you could enter you ZIP code and get a weather report for your area, I would have to do two things:

  • Find a place to gather the weather data from

  • Write bunch of scripts to take data from that place and integrate it into my blog and also a much larger bunch of code to provide you an input form to enter your ZIP code and for my website to preserve that value

To solve the first problem there is the UDDI - a registry of premade portlets. To solve the second problem there is WSRP - an interface for integrating a remote applet into a web page (a portal) in a standart way. This would mean that I would only need to write one tag in my page and the web server (or, usually, the application contaner, like JBoss) will do the rest of conversion and intergation work.
Those corporate programmers are getting lazy by the day :D