WSRP
Hmmmmm, another acronym. WSRP stands for Web Services for Remote Portlets. What does this mean? If you are working with portals like SharePoint and are looking at supporting multiple portals for your application, then WSRP is for you.
To understand WSRP more, imagine that you are developing an application (say a stock quote sample) that generates the quotes for a given set of stock symbols. You then configure an application (maybe VS.NET) that reads data from this web service and then generates content in HTML. This can now be plugged as a web-part into a portal like SharePoint. Easy, right? OK, what happens when you need to integrate with another web-service (say a weather web-service) and show that in SharePoint. You will again have to create an application that uses the weather web service and then generates the appropriate UI. Now, things are getting ugly, right? You will need to write as many interface pages for as many web-services that you want to integrate.
Rather, image for a second if all web-service implemented a standard interface with a bunch of methods that get you either the data or the presentation. Now, all that your application has to do is to call these various interfaces with standard method calls and it will get back presentation content! Similar to writing an interface based implementation, but extended to web-services. If you are with me still now, then WSRP is basically just a WSDL specification that outlines the set of methods and interfaces that a web-service will have to adhere to. These web-services are called producers. Once you have created as many producers as you want, a consumer application (like SharePoint) can simply call the various producers using standard method calls and just render the content. Easy, right and structured too.
What have you achieved? Basically you have eliminated the intermediary application that is required to format the data received into presentable content (you can still do this if needed, though using WSRP). All you will need to know is the URLs to call to get the content and you can now call standard methods and the service will respond in a predictable way.
WSRP is catching up fast and portals like SharePoint 2003 support it already. There is a beta version of a toolkit that you will need to install on top of SharePoint 2003 and once done, you can configure WSRP compliant web-services as web-parts in SharePoint. To get the toolkit, visit: WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint. To know more about WSRP, here is an excellent proposal document from IBM: WSRP Basics. Here is an excellent FAQ on the subject: WSRP FAQ.