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 5th FAST Research Newsletter is out. It contains the main advances in the project during the last months.

You can find it HERE.

During the last 12 and 13 of November a new FAST Face2Face developers meeting took place in SAP headquarters in Zurich. Several hot topics were discussed in three parallel sessions:

1. Architecture and Infrastructure
   • Fast Gadget API
   • Fast Gallery
   • Storage and Deployment
2. Building blocks
   • Pipping
   • Service Wrapping
   • Use case building blocks
     
3. Recomendation and semantics.
   • Catalogue integration
   • Semantics & Ontologies

We are very happy to report back from ICT 2008 where FAST co-organized a very successful networking session titled “Next Generation Service Front-Ends in the future Internet of Services: Research Challenges and Opportunities”.  The session was supported by the Service Front-End Collaboration Working Group of the EC SSAI Unit that FAST chairs and the User Service Interaction Working Group of NESSI.
Distinguished researchers presented their work in various related projects with a particular focus on their vision about the future challenges that lie ahead. The main topics discussed were:

• Supporting Ubiquity in SFEs
• SFE Mashup framewoks
• SFE IDEs for Portable gadgets/widgets
• User-generated service orchestrations and SFEs
• Service annotations for SFE composition
• SFEs for Service Prosumers

The session culminated in a lively panel discussion with active participation from the audience. Some of the main topics discussed were: how to achieve integration of results and a real impact on standardization bodies, what the business ecosystem that will support the future service front-ends will be like,  what is the trade-off between the complexity inherent in orchestration of processes and the simplicity that is required at the front-end level for end user to be able to perform it, how to capture long tail needs by empowering the end users and how to deal with mission critical data and processes in the context of a fully personalized, do-it-yourself front-end layer.