WSRP involves two major entities, a producer and a consumer. The producer offers one or more portlets, information on them, and interfaces for interacting with them. The consumer negotiates with the producer and ultimately presents the portlet contents to an end-user. An example of a producer is a weather information service that hosts interactive applications, and a consumer is a portal site that wants to make these applications available to its users.

The WSRP specification is defined by OASIS, a non-profit global consortium. It defines a set of interfaces for accessing and managing portlets. Portals can use these interfaces to display remotely-running portlets inside their pages, without any additional programming by the portal developers. To the end-user, it appears that the portlet is running locally within their portal, but in reality the portlet resides in a remotely-running portlet container.

The ATG WSRP environment includes a producer, which provides WSRP services, and a consumer, a client portal that aggregates the remote markup fragments provided by the producer(s) into a portal page. Communication between the consumer and producer is based on the standard WSRP interfaces, which allows producers and consumers to interoperate regardless of location and implementation.

For more information on WSRP visit the OASIS site at http://www.oasis-open.org.

The figure that follows shows a high-level WSRP environment:

The ATG consumer and producer can be used in either a homogeneous WSRP environment (ATG consumer and ATG producer) or a heterogeneous environment (mix of ATG and third-party consumer and producer).