This week Roy Russo announced the creation of the Portlet Repository Protocol (PRP) which seeks to create a common web service API that can be used to communicate with portlet repositories. This would allow any portal vendor to browser repositories and download/update portlets like developers currently do when browsing/installing/updating plugins for their IDE of choice.
Current participants include:
The protocol will work as follows:
- A client portal communicates, via the PRP, to one or many portlet repositories.
- The meta-data returned, should be displayed in human-readable format to the end-user/portal-administrator.
- The end-user/portal-administrator can then choose to either install or update existing deployed portlets from one or many repositories.
- Installaton/Updating functions are implementation details left up to the specific portal vendor.
For more on portlets see InfoQ's past coverage of the business case for Portlets.