JSR 168 and WSRP 1.0 - How Mature are Portal Standards?

The benefits of adopting web portals in different scenarios like e-Learning and e-Research are well understood now. With built-in single sign-on (SSO), role-based authorisation management and personalisation, portals provide a uniform interface for seamless access by users to existing or emerging distributed resources such as the Grid. In this paper, two portal standards – Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 will be discussed to reveal how practical they are in developing real world portals. The discussion is based on our work in portal development for several UK e-Science projects including the UK NGS (National Grid Services) Portal and the Sakai VRE Portal Demonstrator project.