ilknur chulani added a comment - 23/Dec/15 12:18 PM Dear Ben van der Veen, Indeed, FIWARE platform is made of components called Generic enablers. Developers can integrate different generic enablers to create interesting future internet applications. I recommend starting with the FIWARE developers/enterpreneurs page : https://www.fiware.org/developers-entrepreneurs/ If you need more detailed technical info about the architecture of the components, or the specifications, etc, you can visit this wiki page: https://forge.fiware.org/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/fiware/index.php/FI-WARE_Architecture or browse through the enablers in the catalogue pages: http://catalogue.fiware.org/ As an environment to develop these applications, you can use our free experimentation environment called FIWARE Lab. You can create VMs, etc. to use the cloud functions, but also can take advantage of the the global instances of these Generic enablers on Fiware Lab, or you can create your own instances of Generic enablers in the same environment. https://account.lab.fiware.org/ Widgets you mention can be used for composing Fiware applications from Fiware widgets, or third party Fiware services. See Wirecloud (the mashup tool) guides/videos for more information. But it is also possible to create Fiware applications only by using generic enablers directly, without using widgets. There is also a very good blog post about creating smart applications with Fiware, which may help: https://www.fiware.org/2015/07/01/what-makes-a-smart-app/ Hope this helps for now. Please feel free to write us again if you have more questions. Best regards, ilknur