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This conventional way of developing applications using programming languages has already been superseded by business-level execution languages that talk business (or use business-friendly jargon) such as BPEL.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 are part of business operation and should be easily available to people across the organization.

Further, we can confidently say that this is where programming is being led. The users must be able to view how the operations are done, how decisions are made, and what the impacts of a change are. jBPM modeling facilities are a huge leap into a completely visual programming experience. Currently, the jBPM arsenal allows us to model business processes and business rules. We can model data and user interfaces through a limited but useful functionality, which minimizes the development and deployment costs. We can also simulate a business process and see how it works along with analyzing the related performance metrics.

Already trending are buzzwords such as IoT or computing everywhere, from the perspective of BPM, these are activities in business operations. Visual programming can help us to encapsulate the logic for communicating with these pervasive devices and give the business, a picture of everyone connected to the process and everyone operating it.