Computer techies, for long, have had a penchant to name their creations after animals but of late, things come to a point where one can’t help getting a bit amused at the sheer contribution that animals and plants seem to be making to open-source technologies rolling off their anvils. Reflecting on a particular data flow I came across the other day, I realised it is a “camel” that really works out the route a message should take through a maze of servers and that a “mule” does its transformation into a particular format. One of these applications uses “snakeyaml” to read business data into objects and both of them send metrics to a “datadog” that is super efficient at converting them into useful performance graphs. Our friend “camel” also uses “springfox” to create documents that help us make sense of those confounding APIs and when any of these “run“, they send all their logs to an “elk” that keeps recording what they have been doing and which itself uses “python” to convert these logs into a canonical form. Hold your breath. “Hibernate” is what they use to store bits and pieces of information into a “mongo” db (mongoose would have been near to perfection) and if the testers ever decide to try and break these guys apart, they resort to serenity-“cucumber“. Another application along the way offers a glossy view into all this through the lens of “thymeleaf” but regardless of their varied personalities, all of them use “java beans” to accomplish what they are meant to. And now, you won’t believe this – there is actually a “zookeeper” tasked with making sure members of this entire array of flora and fauna can talk to each other!! Who said IT professionals too need tickets to enter a zoo?
