Goodbye JSR-168 and WSRP portlets… Hello OpenSocial gadgets!

I’ve been in the portal and content management industry for about 10 years. In that time, I’ve witnessed standards around portal development evolve from the myriad of proprietary specifications each vendor endorsed. The two main standards are JSR-168/286 and WSRP, the Web Services for Remote Portlets specification. As one can guess, the JSR-168/286 specs are specific to the Java world while WSRP held the promise of a cross-platform/cross-language standard. While Java portlets have enjoyed relative success, the same can’t be said for WSRP.

During the last two years we have seen the massive proliferation of web widgets that leveraged simple IFRAMES and/or JavaScript to permit a website or blog to incorporate content from third-party websites. We also saw Google promote Google Gadgets as the means of delivering similar functionality to the iGoogle personalized start page. Since then, Google and many other firms have come together to create a new standard for content syndication and social enablement of web applications taking the form of the OpenSocial specification.

OpenSocial defines a collection of social services and, more pertinent to this discussion, a “gadget service”. This gadget service is based on the Google Gadgets specification and I feel it represents the way that most, if not all “portlets” should be developed going forward. The specification is simple, elegant and incorporates most of the capabilities found in WSRP and JSR-168/286. More importantly, unlike either portlet spec (particularly WSRP), the Open Social Gadgets Specification enjoys very wide adoption in the form of hundreds of thousands of gadgets already being consumed by millions of users.

The popularity of the specification along with its proven model means that it stands a very good chance of not fading into irrelevance as I feel WSRP has done. The benefits of the spec are as follows:

• Truly cross-platform/language without relying on overly elaborate XML.
• Wide adoption means that more developers will be savvy with it and the spec will be more robust.
• Security and data privacy are an integral part of the spec.
• JavaScript is sandboxed via Caja
• There is an accompanying Templates Specification

Admittedly, both the Java Portlet Spec and WSRP are targetted at enterprise deployments and there may very well be scenarios that the OpenSocial Gadget Spec can’t adequately address behind a corporate firewall. That said, I think it’s well worth exploring especially when we consider that many of the social computing concepts being pioneered in the internet are working their way back behind the firewall.

I would really like to see all collaboration and portal vendors adopt all aspects of OpenSocial but the Gadget Specification looks particularly straightforward to implement and will do much to facilitate integration among different intranet applications.