A few days ago I went to a South Indian food festival in Chennai. The venue was a big open area near Marina Beach (World’s The second Largest Beach). Each cook was cooking his/her best receipe from the stalls given to them. I happened to look at one of the chefs who was very busy cooking and serving the customers. He had a menu with fifty different varieties but all he/she had was ten or so existing ingredients. I had a firm sensation that all this very much reminded me of something. Guess what?! – Right, xApps! I was looking at every aspect of the process involved, in accepting the order, cooking and delivering the food. This is quite a strong implementation of xApps, not in software but in our real life. Let me explain.
As you get to any one of the stall a big Information Slate meets you: “ALL visitors to the Token Counters!” The Cashier accepts all visitors and after giving basic instructions (“we accept only cash!”) and redirects you to a queue and assigns you a unique (ordinal) number. By the way, there are two other people, one taking care of food preparation and its process and the other for Food Delivery. Every person has to do his/her own designated work on the stall, based on the instructions given to them. To have any kind of food a customer has to collect the tokens from the cashier and should submit to the person preparing food and delivery is taken care by other person. So each visitors' food order becomes an “object” routing between different services according to a specific workflow and notified by proper messages. Every service knows how to carry out its own operation. I consider each Food Prepared as a collection of processes just as, each xApps consists of a collection of processes .The Ingredients are the Use Cases as such in xApps. And as how preparation of food processes involved few activities, each process in xApps is a collection of activities. Each person on the stall is assigned with a role as how in xApps each is assigned to a responsible “role” which gets resolved to an individual or automated process at instantiation time. It’s all just about Re-inventing your Existing Ingredients to different food, similar to existing architecture to Cross-Applications with most out of what you already have and enabling greater collaboration with highly adaptive processes.
Fried Chicken satiates the hunger with taste where as this technology chicken solves Business problems.
