After three exciting years, the FAST project now finally comes to a close. From the start, our goal was to put the tools to create small but complex Web applications – call them enterprise mashups or situational widgets or gadgets – directly into the hands of end users, without having to rely on programmers and developers to do the job for them. Looking back at everything now, we feel that our work was very successful: we did the research, the design and the development to produce these tools, and we spent significant efforts to test and evaluate them, focussed a lot on usability, and made sure they really work for the people who should use them. If you want to see for yourself, have a look at a recent blog post about FAST in a Nutshell, or just dive right in and try out our demo!

Marking the end of the project, we have also released the final version of our regular newsletter, which will give you more details about the latest developments in our toolset (such as debugging features, improved deployment and semantics-based recommendation features), a wrap-up of recent dissemination activities, and a complete list of all scientific publications done during the course of the project.

So, what is next for FAST? While the official project duration is over, we expect our tools and research to be carried on in other contexts now. E.g., to mention a number of follow-up projects that FAST consortium mebers are involved in: in the 4Caast Project, FAST-created gadgets can either play the role of an application provider, or the FAST platform can be used to assist the mashing-up of different applications. Similarly, the Cloud4SOA project can apply the technology and lessons learned for semantic interoperability of application components in FAST. On the other hand, projects such as Puzzled by Policy will be able to apply the FAST platform (or a derivative) to empower citizens to make better use of public sector data and services.

Goodbye FAST – Long live FAST!

Do end-users accept end-user development by using FAST? Using the technology acceptance model, we have investigated the acceptance of the FAST platform FAST (http://demo.fast.morfeo-project.org), which enables end-users to build their own application by simply drag and drop graphical building blocks.

The platform had shown an active interest among 159 individuals worldwide. The outcome demonstrated that perceived usefulness strongly affected the attitude towards using the FAST platform for end-user development. In turn, perceived ease of use did not. With respect to the FAST concept, it was found that the available content within the platform is the main influencing factor on the acceptance of end-user development by using FAST.

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• to design an enterprise-class application within minutes instead of hours or even days
• to create your own application by reusing existing building blocks in a similar way to the LEGO approach
• to publish the small applications on various environments such as iGoogle, Netvibes, Facebook, EzWeb, iPhone, etc.

Watch the video to learn more about FAST.

The FAST consortium has put in contact with Open Mashup Alliance (OMA). The main objective of these contacts is to explore the possibility of modeling FAST piping using EMML standard. We are working on aligning both approaches, focusing in reducing the differences of them, but it seems possible to implement FAST import/export using a EMML subset, and extend the standard with more data sources, FAST-triggers or some high level pipping structures.

The April edition of the NESSI newsletter reports on the Future Internet Assembly (April 15-16, 2010) and the NESSI Projects Summit (April 12-13, 2010), which were both held in Valencia, Spain. FAST were there presenting its latest findings and achievements. In particular, FAST organised an information booth at the FIA Exhibition. On tuesday 13th FAST participated in the “From Service Front ends to Security, check out which projects are relevant!” sessions. These sessions had the objective to clarify the results reached in each working area and introduced future developments as well as future plans. For each of the considered areas, one or more NESSI Strategic/Compliant Projects took the lead, and FAST excelled at Service Front-ends.