Things have gotten pretty complex with IT recently. The Internet brought us nearly-ubiquitous connectivity, yet it seems to have made everything much more convoluted along the way. Multi-tier architectures, intermittently connected mobile devices, XML and Web Services standards by the dozens are all bringing their fair share of complexity. Put together, they draw an almost inextricable picture which beauty can only be appreciated on purely artistic grounds. In short, it is time for a new round of simplification, and innovative forms of abstraction will play a key role in that game.

Within this category, we will cover areas such as Design-Driven Architecture (a pragmatic variation of OMG’s Model-Driven Architecture), Business Process Management (as defined through the what paper that originally introduced the concept of BPMS to the market), Semantic Web, and other software development models that lower the barrier to adoption by raising the level of abstraction.

We will also talk about visual programming and concepts of “Zero Code” and “1-Click Deployment”. By so doing, we will demonstrate why there is hope beyond the past failure of Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE). But most importantly, we will try to follow Albert Einstein’s words of wisdom: “Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler”.