We are very glad to tell you about the first FAST annual workshop, entitled Open Alliance on Service Front-ends: Developing Technologies, Tools and Vision that will Enable User-Service Interaction in the Future Internet of Services that has been recently organized and chaired by the FAST Project. This workshop took place during the ServiceWave 2008 Conference in Madrid, Spain, on 13th December 2008, immediately after the Future Internet Assembly event organised by the European Commission.
With 250 attendees, ServiceWave attracted a varied and pro-active audience. From lively workshops and industrial panels to innovative scientific papers, from corporate strategies to social events, ServiceWave 2008 achieved its goal of creating an exchange forum across all communities. ServiceWave 2008 has been the first event organised through a collaboration from the European and National Technology Platforms, from Networks of Excellence. And the event lived up to the expectations of this collaboration.
In this excellent context, our workshop gave the opportunity for six European projects (all of them related to service front-ends) to exchange positions on current and emerging related topics, including service mashups, mashup platforms, gadget development tools, mashupable user interfaces, global SOA and so on. The event was celebrated in a lively and friendly atmosphere. It was a great success and a number of alliances and sinergies between the different projects and FAST were identified. Moreover, the FAST Workshop fitted within activities of the EU SSAI Service Front-Ends Collaboration Working Group chaired by FAST as well as the NESSI User Service Front-end Working Group.
The projects presented during the workshop were:
- FAST: our project was introduced to workshop attendees. Main ideas were explained supported by the last version of the gadget visual studio prototype. Both the presentation and the demo raised lots of questions and feedback.
- EzWeb (NESSI’s Strategic Project): the EzWeb project is based on the development of key technologies to be employed in building the front-end layer of a new generation SOA architecture. Among the first technologies developed there is a fully-fledged Mashup Platform capable of collaborative gadget catalogue. It was demonstrated that EzWeb is already capable of deploying a FAST gadget.
- MyMobileWeb (Eureka-CELTIC Flagship Project): MyMobileWeb is a low-cost, modular, open-standards-based, open source software platform that simplifies the development of top-quality mobile web applications and portals, providing an advanced content & application adaptation environment.
- InContext (EU FP6 Project): The inContext project is aimed at developing a novel scientific approach to the problem of enabling diverse individual knowledge workers in separate organizations to work in effective team collaboration with one another. The end result of the research will emphasize P2P collaboration software capabilities.
- ICT-OPEN (EU FP7 Project): The objective of OPEN is to provide users with migratory interactive services, which enable users to change interaction platform while continuing their tasks through an interface adapted to the new context in which it will be used.
- ServFace (EC FP7 Project): The project ServFace will extend service-oriented architecture concepts with an integrated approach of user interface description and development by introducing the notion of a correspondent user interface for services.
You can find more information about the workshop here. Follow the links to download the workshop leaflet or to watch the demo video.
Some pictures of the event…

