Portal, Express Beta Version 6.1 Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux,Windows

What is new in WSRP

IBM^® WebSphere^® Portal Express Version 6.1 provides several new features.

WSRP features related to WSRP 2.0

Eventing

The portal now supports eventing for remote portlets. Eventing allows portlets to send events to other portlets or receive events from other portlets. You can send events from one remote portlet to another remote portlet, from a local portlet to a remote portlet, or from a remote portlet to a local portlet. In this case the Consumer acts as a mediator. This means, in order to make use of events, you have to wire the remote portlets on the Consumer side as you would have to do when using events for local portlets.

Public render parameters

Public render parameters allow portlets to share parameters with other portlets. Portlets can declare which public parameters they want to receive. This allows portlets to react in a coordinated manner to specific parameters. For example, portlets could react to a parameter that relates to a postal code and then display information related to the actual postal code.

Resource serving

Resource serving allows portlets to serve resource requests in resource URLs. With WSRP 2.0, requests for resources such as PDF documents are addressed within the WSRP protocol. Formerly an out-of-band connection was required for such resources, for example HTTP. Resources are now portal context aware, as the context information is passed directly over the WSRP protocol.

Other new WSRP features

Improved Cookie Handling

The portal WSRP Consumer now handles all cookies that are set by remote portlets. These are either cookies for the session context that are set during session initialization, or, for JSR 286 portlets, cookies set by the portlet itself. The portal also handles cookies set by resources that are served by the WSRP Consumer as a proxy. Cookies that the Consumer receives are stored in the Consumer session and forwarded in later requests to remote portlets and resources served by the WSRP Consumer as a proxy according to the standard cookie matching and expiry rules.

Advanced security configuration options

The portal now provides improved WS-Security support for the WSRP Consumer. You can configure WS-Security for individual WSRP Producers by using the portal administrative portlets or the XML configuration interface by selecting a security profile. The portal provides three default WSRP security profiles and allows you to add your own custom profiles. Additionally, you can dynamically set whether requests to a Producer use HTTP, HTTPS, or, if the Producer can handle both, the current protocol on the Consumer. For the WSRP Producer, the portal provides three sample WS-Security configurations that correspond to the default security profiles on the Consumer side and allow a faster setup.

Support of relative URLs for resources served by the WSRP Consumer as a proxy

The internal proxy server of the portal WSRP Consumer can now handle relative references. URLs to this proxy server are still protected, so that the base URL up to the resource cannot be manipulated. This allows you, for example, to embed style sheets or images addressed by relative URLs in resources served by the WSRP Consumer as a proxy without having to rewrite .