Standards for second-generation portals

By integrating applications and resources, portals let users access information in a simple, straightforward manner. Currently, most portals let users create one or more personal pages composed of portlets - interactive Web mini-applications. Until recently, no standards for portlets existed, and thus consuming remote portlets in a generic way or deploying portlets in one portal server that were developed in a different one has been impossible. Two standards released in Fall 2003 - the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and the Java portlet specification - address these problems. This articles outlines these standards and presents a typical architecture for a standards-based portal.