The Open Source Reference Implementations unit of Telefónica R&D, leader of MyMobileWeb and EzWeb projects, has prepared a survey on portal technologies as part of its research within the framework of Service Front Ends for the Future Internet of Services. With this survey, we aim to present our vision about the evolution of Web technologies towards the creation of online channels.

The following slides collect the main stages of the Evolution of the Web and its impact on portal development. However, remaining problems keep this evolution alive, raising new technological challenges and setting new trends that will determine the future of the web portal development.

Find the slides on this site: survey of portal technologies (ppt)

After various sessions in important European events (ICT 2008, ServiceWave 2008 etc. ), targeted to make the initiative known and stimulate collaboration, our alliance continues to gain momentum.

The ideas, ambition and objectives of the SFE OA appear  to be shared by many organizations in the European research community, something that has allowed us to already count on a solid core of member organizations.  The initial list of organizations that created the SFE Open Alliance is:

• Telefónica I+D, Spain
• SAP Research, Switzerland
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid - UPM, Spain
• Viena University of Technology - TUV, Austria
• Université Catholique de Louvain - UCL, Belgium
• University of St Gallen, Switzerland
• Instituto di Scienza e Technologie dell’Informazione - ISTI, Italy

The following organizations have recently joined the initiative:

• Telecom Italia, Italy
• Franhoufer Institute, Germany
• DERI Galway, Ireland
• Fundación CTIC, Spain

In 2009 we have already had three internal workshops , one hosted by SAP in Zurich on the 11th,12th,13th of February, another in Madrid on the 10th,11th,12th of March and the last one right after the Future Internet Assembly event organized by the European Commission in Prague, and are now gearing up our activities.

Since the first workhop the SFE OA members have had the chance to setup the main guiding principles and objectives of the alliance. In addtion, an analysis has been carried out, targeted to the identification of projects that will form the foundations upon which  the whole vision is going to be built. Currently, the following projects have been selected:

•         EzWeb
•         FAST
•         OPUCE
•         MyMobileWeb
•         inContext
•         USIXml

However, the list of projects aiming to contribute is growing.

One of the main achievements of the activity so far has been the publication of the SFE Open Alliance’s manifesto you can read here.   All  organizations subscribing objectives and principles established in this manifesto are invited to join their forces.

Summarizing, we now  have a nucleus of very relevant members,  an ambitious but concrete vision, a solid foundation of results coming from successful and widely recognized projects and an initial set of challenges to be addressed by forthcoming activities and projects.   Join us if you share the spirit !

On the 13th of December the second SFE Open Alliance Workshop was held in Madrid during the ServiceWave 2008 conference. The workshop was also supported by the SFE Collaboration Working Group and the FP7 FAST project. On behalf of all the people involved in the organization the workshop, we would like to thank the people that attended despite it being on a Saturday. 6 projects presented their vision on the future service front-ends and a lively discussion about current and future trends was held. The rendezvous has been renewed for January 2009 to discuss in more details the scope and planning of the alliance with all the contributors that are willing to commit to this effort.

The presentations of the workshop can be found here 

This paper aims to describe our vision on Service Front End in next-generation SOA and the future Internet of Services. Our ambition is that the essence of this vision, the basic underlying principles and the overall skeleton of the proposal, will be supported by all the members of the group and that we will work together in order to make this vision a reality.

The first working draft of the SFE position paper was published on the 21st of July and was referred in the 1st Invitation to Contribute issued by the EU FP7 project NEXOF-RA. The NEXOF-RA project aims to produce open specifications of components in the target Architecture of the Future Internet of Services.

You can also find a copy of the document on this site: SFE Position Paper Working draft (pdf)

NEXOF-RA has launched its first invitation to contribute. The topics on User Interaction are of particular interest to this group.

This is the NEXOF-RA announcement:

NEXOF-RA, the NESSI flagship Strategic Project within the EU Seventh Framework Programme, is building an Open Reference Architecture for service frameworks through a collaborative process. We invite you to join with leading actors from both industry and academia, and contribute to this important community effort. In doing so, you will influence and build the service architecture of the future and give visibility to the results of your research and development.

We seek contribution at this time on the following topics:

Core Service Framework Area

- Service Description

- Design Time Service Composition

- Service Discovery

- Interoperability of Message-Based Service Interaction

User Interaction Area

- Declarative Authoring Language for User Interfaces

- Context Model and Universal APIs

Infrastructure Area

- Definition of Infrastructure Services

Security Area

- Dynamic identity management for SOA

- Privacy Management in SOA

Quality of Service Area

- Scalable Approaches to Service Oriented Infrastructures

- Highly Availability for Multi-Tier Architectures

For further information, please refer to the attached document or visit our website, http://www.nexof-ra.eu/open_construction_process. If you want to join us, you must register your interest by September 5th, 2008.