Business process technology for the enterprise

A method for developing and executing a business application without programming and without generating code for any business domain using a visual modeling environment, the business application is developed with a reduced software development life cycle, the method executed by a Central Processing Unit (CPU) comprising the steps of:

• a. identifying the business requirements of the business application as a plurality of business processes;
• b. enabling an application designer to develop the business application without programming, the business application being developed by modeling each of the plurality of business processes using the visual modeling environment, each of the plurality of business processes comprising a plurality of business tasks, each of the plurality of business tasks being modeled as a plurality of instances of a plurality of prebuilt and reusable abstract business components, the visual modeling environment being used to select the plurality of instances of abstract business components, each of the plurality of abstract business components being a highly abstract object performing a specific function in a generic manner, each of the plurality of abstract business components comprising a plurality of Graphical User Interface (GUI) objects encapsulating application specific parameters, the application specific parameters defining functionality of each of the plurality of abstract business components, the application specific parameters being added to each of the plurality of abstract business components using the plurality of GUI objects to model each of the plurality of business tasks, wherein the selected instances of abstract business components with business process specific run-time properties being connected in a logical order to model each of the plurality of business processes;
• c. storing each of the plurality of business processes as meta-data, one set of the meta-data allows the application designer to provide startup parameters to the plurality of business processes including a unique system-generated parameter identifier, a parameter name, a direction meta-data indicating an incoming or an outgoing parameter, a parameter type, a list meta-data implying the parameter may have any one of values specified in the list meta-data, and a default parameter value;
• and
• d. executing each of the plurality of modeled business tasks associated with each of the plurality of business processes by an engine without generating code to execute the business application, the engine performing concurrent interpretation, and execution of a plurality of requests, the concurrent execution being performed on the plurality of instances of the plurality of abstract business components,
• wherein the method for developing and executing a business application eliminates the need for a business application developer to have an expertise in a formal computer programming language.