Interesting Findings
of My Research

I am looking at providing a framework to develop visual languages for use with business modeling. This project is aimed at providing support for decision making during the business process. I am also interested in finding and describing the design patterns in visual languages and business modeling. To support this I am also researching "Domain Analysis and Engineering". This project is being funded by Caterpillar at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Following is a listing of relevant findings, "what have we learned from this work".

Today's business applications need flexible tools that allow for the development of dynamic applications that support the three-tier architecture. Object-oriented tools support this by allowing for quick development of prototypes that can be extended with a minimum amount of effort to production environments.

Visual languages can support rapid application development while assisting in the minimization of errors. Frameworks can be developed that assist the expert and amateur programmers to more quickly develop applications. The benefit of the programmer is that s/he is able to focuse more on domain analysis and how to support the needs of the specific domain rather than getting caught up in the trap of focusing primarily on language quirks.

The primary work done here focused on the development of frameworks supporting a visual language for the development of financial client-server applications that access relational databases. These visual languages have provided means for "almost" complete development of DuPont financial applications with summary reports, graphing, context-sensitive help, access to SQL-Objects, and more by simply drawing items on the screen and by describing constraints and desired queries.

"More will be Revealed" as this is on-going work.