(Boston) - OASIS, the XML interoperability consortium, announced the formation of the OASIS Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) Technical Committee to create an XML and Web services standard that will allow the plug-n-play of visual, user-facing Web services with portals or other intermediary Web applications. These WSRP services will enable businesses to provide content or applications in a form that does not require any manual or application-specific adaptation by consuming portals and applications.

"Once a WSRP service has been published to a public directory, portal administrators will be able to locate and dynamically integrate it with just a few mouse clicks," explained Thomas Schaeck of IBM, chair of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee. "WSRP will enable distributed portal systems where portals share portlets as visual, user-facing Web services for integration with other portals."

WSRP will allow remote portlet Web services to be implemented in a variety of ways, including Java/J2EE and Microsoft's .NET platform. WSRP services will be built on standard technologies including SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL.

"To ensure reuse and compatibility, the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee will work closely with other OASIS Web services initiatives, especially the OASIS Web Services Interactive Applications (WSIA) Technical Committee," said Karl Best, director of technical operations for OASIS. He noted that the group also plans to harmonize WSRP with existing Web application programming models (e.g., Portals/Portlets) and the work of the W3C (e.g., XForms, DOM, XML Events, XPath, XLink, XML Component API task force). "A fundamental operating principal of OASIS is to enable convergence and avoid overlap whenever possible," added Best.

Members of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee include consortium sponsors, Bowstreet, Divine, Documentum, Epicentric, Factiva, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, Interwoven, IONA, Oracle Corp., Plumtree Software, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, SilverStream Software, and other OASIS members. Participation remains open to all organizations and individuals interested in advancing Web services for remote portals. Information on joining OASIS can be found at http://www.oasis-open.org/join.

OASIS will host an open mail list for public comment on WSRP, and completed work will be freely available to the public without licensing or other fees.