Just reading an interesting document wherein elixir takes an important placehttp://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.05976.pdf49 . BPM (business process management), for those who never heard of it, is a sort of Model Driven Development; in BPM you model a workflow / process mostly visual and use this model for execution. So the process that was hidden in your code becomes visible and maintainable for business specialists (I mean specialists that do not code). It can be used together with other MDD parts like BRM (business rules management). Here the rules are extracted out of the code. Even the screen / form builder where you visually compose your forms is a form of MDD. You can choose to create executable models (for example an xml or json that can be interpreted by your code), generate code based on your model or choose a mix. I prefer executable models. Here a company that did a lot of research which names key advantages: https://www.mendix.com/blog/the-power-of-mendix/30 .

In this paper, we propose to rethink the dominantlogic of how to model business processes. We think that an actorbased approach supports in a much better way the fundamentalnature of business processes. We present a proposal for a compilerarchitecture to model and execute business processes as a setof communicating microservices that are hosted on a generalpurpose virtual machine for distributed execution.