An Application Framework for Business Developers to Create Service Based Business Applications

Enabling business developers to create business applications greatly reduces development cost and increases business adaptiveness. However, lacking of an application framework that is amenable to business people makes it hard for business developers to create decent business applications. This paper presents such a business application framework that consists of application components primarily including business artifacts, forms and tasks that business developers can easily work with. The different types of components are automatically composed into a service based application with Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm. The advanced business developers are allowed to write scripts to manipulate the behavior of the components and mash-up with external services for better customization and integration. The design considerations for the supporting tools and run-time are also discussed in detail in the paper. At the end, the feedback we got and consolidated from practitioners is analyzed for identifying potential enhancement and major future work.