Gervas Douglas wrote:
> Robin, you are in a food-conscious country, so this Pizza/Sandwich
> example resonates :).
>
> Supposing the sandwich company bought a pizza outlet down the street
> and decided to leverage its existing daytime office customer base to
> sell more pizzas. They might decide to keep the retail and production
> aspects of the business separate but integrate food delivery and
> customer relationships for both businesses. A trivial example in the
> world of enterprise apps, but it illustrates, albeit very
> simplistically, the problem faced by, say, financial services
> conglomerates who wish to present one business face to the customer
> for a variety of products and services, aspects of whose autonomy they
> still want to retain. Unless handled with an intelligent and adaptive
> architectural approach, this sort of scenario can end up as a systems
> nightmare. It is after all essentially a business issue, and being a
> business
> issue, it is liable to change at any moment, thereby necessitating a highly
> flexible response from IT. There is nothing original or novel in this, but
> at
> times it can get easily forgotten in the technical minutiae!
The issue is whether the original system was designed to sell sandwiches, or
food products. There's a hierarchy of subclassing in the OO world where you
might have
MonetaryTransaction
SellSomething
SellFood
SellSandwiches
SellChips
SellDrinks
BuySomething
BuyFood
BuyHoagies
BuyMeat
BuyTurkey
BuyBeef
BuyChicken
BuyCheese
BuySwissCheese
BuyCheddarCheese
BuySharpCheddarCheese
BuyMildCheddarCheese
If the software reflects this layered approach to the various pieces of selling
sandwiches than it will be easy to plug in "SellPizzas" et.al.
It's the notion of minimal typing that I like to use to manage this issue in my
software. Adding the specialization is the last choice I make.
Gregg Wonderly
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