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.
Fast and Advanced Storyboard Tools (FAST) Project
FAST aims at providing an innovative visual programming environment that will facilitate the development of next-generation composite user interfaces. It constitutes a novel approach to application composition and business process definition from a top-down user-centric perspective.For a quick overview of FAST, please refer to Getting Started section.
FAST is a Small or Medium-scale Focused Research Collaborative Project (STREP) supported by the European Commission under its 7th Framework Programme (FP7). It is among the first batch of FP7 projects on Services and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering. FAST started on 1st March 2008 and will come to an end officially on 31th March 2011. It has a total funding of €3,5 M (overall budget €5,5 M)
Project Overview
The main objective of the project is to create a new a visual programming environment that will facilitate the development of complex front-end gadgets, involving execution of relatively complex business processes that rely on back-end semantic Web services. The approach adopted will be user-centric rather than program-centric: instead of first building programs that orchestrate available semantic Web services and then try to figure out how to implement interaction with the users at given points of the process execution flow, programmers will start from the front-end gadgets that the user will see and interact with, and then, afterwards, they will visually establish the connection to back-end Web services going through process execution flows if necessary. The way programmers will visually establish this connection will follow an approach similar to what sequence diagrams in UML look like.
Latest activity:
Following the develop-once-deploy-everywhere philosophy, one of the main objectives of the FAST project is to allow users to design a screenflow and create different gadgets for a wide variety of target platforms. From now on, besides EzWeb Gadgets, Gadget Visual Storyboard tool can generate a new gadget implementation: Google Gadgets.
Taking into account this new functionality, FAST users can publish their gadgets in the following destination platforms:
- EzWeb
- iGoogle Directory or iGoogle Personal Page
- Orkut
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:
- Architecture and Infrastructure
- Fast Gadget API
- Fast Gallery
- Storage and Deployment
- Building blocks
- Pipping
- Service Wrapping
- Use case building blocks
- Recomendation and semantics.
- Catalogue integration
- Semantics & Ontologies
Tomorrow, 24/11/2009, the Workshop on User-generated Services (UGS2009) will take place at ICSOC2009 in Stockholm, Sweden. The workshop extends the notion of user-generated content, which is at the heart of the Web2.0 paradigm, to services. Can end users be empowered not only to contribute content to the Web, but to define their own, personalised working environment, creating and adapting functionality and services to their own needs?The workshop is co-organised and sponsored by the FAST project, and among others features two presentations by FAST members. Also, there will be an invited talk on the Open Alliance for Service Front Ends, for which FAST was one of the founding members.
The FAST project online user evaluation has finished. This evaluation has been fully satisfactory. Most of the evaluators defined FAST as a good or excellent tool. Besides, they have provided a set of recommendations and new features proposal that will be analysed by the FAST team.