Phil Windley points to a post by Sean McGrath, who says: “Visual programming is largely pointless as long as the predominant programming paradigm remains imperative logic. Now, switch to a data flow oriented, SOA world and visual programming makes a lot more sense in my opinion. Picture logistics infrastructures. Picture aviation hubs. Picture model railways. Now imagine business folk constructing visual models of how their data flows through messaging pipes and hubs and flows through data transforming ‘services’…. Once we switch paradigm from algorithm-centric (programmer friendly) to data-centric (business friendly), we can start to talk the same language and – irony of ironies – this type of “talking” is much easier to visualize.”
Adds Phil: “Sean McGrath has a tough time seeing the case for visual programming languages in a predominantly imperative programming model. I think he’s on the mark. But Sean thinks SOA will change this. This is already true, to some extent. Several of the Web services intermediary products I’ve reviewed recently use visual prgramming tools, notably Grand Central Communications and CommerceOne’s Conductor.”
We want to create a visual programming environment for business process with our Visual Biz-ic, which is currently under development.
