A standard from OASIS called Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is used so portlets can be decoupled from a portal. In part one (JDJ, Volume. 13, issue 3) of this article, we introduced the relevant standards and specifications and then demonstrated WSRP’s capabilities by consuming a WebSphere Portal portlet in WebLogic Portal.

In this second article, we’ll explore the reverse scenario by illustrating WebSphere Portal acting as the portlet consumer and WebLogic operating as the portlet producer.

For WebSphere Portal to consume a WebLogic Portal portlet, several things have to happen:

WebLogic Portal

• Functions as a producer
• Offers (shares) the portlet

WebSphere Portal

• Functions as a consumer
• Adds a remote producer
• Creates a remote portlet
• Adds the remote portlet to a page

Once again, WebSphere Portal and WebLogic Portal both function as consumers and producers without requiring any special setup. However, the other steps still need to be taken.

WebLogic Portal – Offer a Portlet
WebLogic Portal automatically lets portlets created using WebLogic for Workshop be shared. There’s a property called Offer as Remote that’s set to true by default. Unfortunately, this property isn’t visible in the WebLogic Portal Administration Console. It’s only visible in WebLogic for Workshop.

Consequently, there’s nothing you have to do to share the portlet. This is different from the way WebSphere Portal behaves, since WebSphere Portal requires that you explicitly share the portlet using the administration console. Now it’s on to configuring the consumer.

WebSphere Portal - Add a Producer
Log onto WebSphere Portal (http://portalpc:10038/wps/portal). Click the Launch button and select Administration to navigate to the WebSphere Portal Administration Console.

Click the Web Services node underneath Portlet Management in the navigation bar.

Click the New Producer button in the Web Service Configuration administration portlet.

Unlike in WebLogic Portal, there’s only one step involved in adding a producer. Enter a Title for the producer, which serves as a label. In this case, input BEA WebLogic Portal Server v9.2. Next, input the URL to WSDL service definitions. This URL points to the WSDL document that contains information about the producer and how to connect to its services. Specifically, it contains the URLs of the WSRP interfaces supported by the provider. In the case of WebLogic Portal, the standard format for this URL is http://host:port/WebAppName/producer?wsdl

In our case, this URL translates to http://portalpc:7001/BEAPortalWeb/producer?wsdl. Enter this URL.