The combination of business process management (BPM) with service-oriented architecture (SOA) is driving modeling for application development, said Steve Hendrick, group vice president of application development research at Independent Data Corp. (IDC).

Commenting on this week's release of model-driven SOA tools by Telelogic AB, he said, "I don't see where if you want to address SOA in a scaleable way, you can go down that path without support for modeling."

As enterprise IT looks for a more structured and consistent way of building applications so that it can get the SOA benefits of Web services reuse, modeling from the high level business requirements to the nitty-gritty processes provides a way to do that, Hendrick said. But it is a trend that most analysts, himself included, did not expect to emerge so quickly.

"Many of us underestimated just how fast business process modeling would become a topical issue for organizations," he said. "Historically, we only had UML process modeling that was low level and wasn't much use in SOA."

Back in the day, developers pretty much stuck with gathering requirements, which usually ended up gathering dust on a shelf, and then got down to coding applications. With the adoption of SOA and BPM and attendant technologies, including business process modeling notation (BPMN) and business process execution language (BPEL), that approach is going over the application development waterfall in a barrel.

"In the last couple years the thrust of BPMN brought business process modeling to the forefront," Hendrick said. "This whole idea of being able to get BPMN specified and link that to BPEL and do some automated code generation is intriguing, especially when you combine that with the business rules capability that most of the BPMN vendors offer."

Read the complete article by Rich Seeley, SearchSOA.com.