By nature, this journey towards the declarative approach to software engineering was sometimes bumpy, and early adopters remember the frustration tolerance needed to deal with creating complex BPEL processes around 2009. Cryptic exceptions resembled the experience of early J2EE development in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, Oracle spent a lot of time and effort in making the development experience as smooth as possible. We can see how history repeats itself. The 12c versions show a plateau of development maturity that is similar to the J2EE development experience of the early 2000's application servers that was based on well-understood design patterns and robust design-time and runtime behaviors.

To which degree all the statements that have been made on the adoption of recent SOA/BPM middleware remain mere marketing statements remains to be seen. Yet, it will be measurable. While currently most skills are still available on large programming languages, it will be very...