Market forces and end-user programming for mission-critical systems
Lutz Prechelt, Daniel J. Hutzel · 2005
The abaXX Workflow Engine (WFE) is a J2EE COTS software component, part of a larger suite for building web-based systems. Although these systems are usually mission-critical (the customers often being financial institutions), a visual tool that could be used for end-user programming, called the Process Modeler, proved important for marketing the WFE and the component suite in general. The promise of end-user programming (EUP), however, never materialized. This article sketches the evolution of the WFE. It de-scribes why the EUP capabilities were required, why they were never really used in practice, and how to reconcile these two facts.