Enterprise Builder

Created by Bard Bloom, Sarvamangala Jagadeesh, Darrell Reimer, Ian Simmonds, Mark Wegman

Enterprise Builder is a high-level, visual language for describing and envisioning business processes: essentially computerized red tape. Business people, with the aid of knowledgeable consultants, will use it to describe the way they want their organization to work, using three main dimensions: the people involved and their roles; the information; the activities that the people perform. The description can be compiled to give a sample application. Currently and probably for several years, the applications are not industrial strength, but are sufficient to be used by the prospective users of the final application, allowing them to experience the program they are considering before it is fully developed using conventional technology. Essentially EB is a very high level visual programming language designed to produce enterprise applications with the target being IBM's middleware instead of a machine language.

Not only do we want to produce applications much more rapidly, we want the applications to be more modifiable and to be more pleasant for their users and better for the enterprise that employs them. Making them more modifiable means that we have had to explore some novel means of dealing with encapsulation in the language, and making the applications more flexible meant some interesting directions on modelling domains that can't be modelled with conventional OO technology. Enterprise Builder will include a novel data model allowing multiple orthogonal class hierarchies, and include both logically- and procedurally-controlled processes.

We hope to put a paper here, but until we do here is a presentation (Here is a Freelance Reader)