Glossary
This is collection of terms related to Athena and its concepts.
Application Concerns
Health Check
A Health Check is a mechanism to programatically assert if the web service is healthy or not in a binary yes/no fashion.
Feature Flag
A Feature Flag is a boolean configuration mechanism that can be used to turn certain capabilities on or off via a simple flag-like setting.
System Config
System Config is a layered configuration infrastructure that makes it easy to handle configuration within the code, as well as easy to specify configuration in different environments.
Request Log
The Request Log is an extensible log line that Athena emits after a request has been handled and responded to. The data in this log line is built up as the request is processed and it includes information about nearly every phase of processing a request, including how long things took at both fine-grained and aggregate levels.
File Store
A File Store is the generic name for the source of the users' files, like OpenStack Swift and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
Miscellaneous
Spock
Spock is a Groovy-based BDD-style testing framework.
Groovy
Groovy is a dynamic JVM-based programming language. It's dynamic and flexible nature make it particularly good for uses like testing.
Servlet
A Servlet is a Java construct that usually is designed to handle an HTTP request. For Athena, we also have a Servlet construct, and while it's similar to the Java construct, it's more akin to a Controller in other MVC web frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Grails.
Meta Data
A Meta Data is some piece of combined information that describes a general file, such as file name and file type.
Web Service
A software system, usually located at the server side in a client-server organization on the web, acting as middleware or interface between a client and a database server. In a more general definition, W3C defines web service as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.
See also web service.