The Quest for the Domain Expert
Compare the following quote from the EJB 1.1 specification:
The Application Assembler is a domain expert who composes applications that use enterprise Beans.
to this quote I found describing BPEL:
After the developer does the prep work, a domain expert pulls the services from a palette and connects them with lines that represent workflow.
Now, I’ve made quite a few EJB’s in my day, but I’ve never met an Application Assembler in my life. Somebody who took (existing) components and created new applications using them. Somehow, it all came down to us developers.
My burning question is: what has changed? Why would the domain expert want to compose services with BPEL/WS/SOA, when he didn’t want to with EJB?