The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) v1.0 specification (an OASIS approved standard) defines an interface and the semantics necessary for content services to be rapidly added to the set of available content at aggregating intermediaries, such as portals. By using web services as the underlying infrastructure, the platform and technologies used to produce this content and handle user interactions with it become independent choices of the content producer and consumer. WSRP uses WSDL to define the interface such that consumers will be able to interact with all such content services using generic means that are service independent. This enables the rapid addition of these services to the set of available content that can be aggregated into end-user pages as it only requires administrative set-up rather than developer effort. WSRP defines the semantics and information exchange required for such areas as; producing presentation markup fragments that can be composed into a page with other fragments (e.g. same mime type, character set), production of URLs within the presentation markup, processing the activation of such URLs and state management of various types (e.g. sessions, navigational state, portlet configuration, etc.).

The first version of the specification has focused on making these items work in a manner that can run on today's most popular web stacks (in all cases some bugs were reported and fixes made available). In addition, care has been taken to ensure the concepts and available data are aligned with the requirements of the Java community portlet API specification that was being developed during the same time frame. There currently are vendor implementations interoperating using each of the most popular web stacks.

A brief glimpse will also be provided into the ongoing work for defining follow-on versions of the specification. Areas of ongoing work include providing mechanisms for the consumer to coordinate updates to multiple portlets from a single user interaction and defining the markup fragment rules needed in order to aggregate various additional presentation markup types.