Business programming

Enterprise applications are driven by business needs. In other words, we program these applications to satisfy certain business requirements. Further, in a traditional software development life cycle, the requirements are communicated by the business users to the software developers, who consolidate and convert them into executable implementations.

This conventional way of developing applications using programming languages has already been superseded by business-level execution languages that talk business (or use business-friendly jargon) such as BPEL. In the current arena, to improve usability and maintainability, they are evolving into applications supporting visual business-oriented programming of which jBPM is a flag bearer.

"A picture is worth a thousand words"—this quote can explain why we need visual programming. The objective is obviously to communicate effectively. No longer is programming considered to be wizardry, programs and their logic...