Princess IT News - Onboard Finances

[MacMadame]

I'm job searching and got an email from a recruiter for a contract job with Princess. I was very interested in this one line from the email:

 

• Client is getting off of First Data (AUD) and customized mainframe solution (POLAR) for shipboard financial settlement/tokenization.   

 

 

(For people who don't know, POLAR is the system the TAs and cruise lines use to book and manage your cruise -- and other travel. First Data is a company that processes financial transactions, i.e., credit cards)

 

The job description also says:

 

• Must be an expert in Java 11 development.  They also will be using SpringBoot for this project and the middleware layer is MuleSoft.  The backend database is Oracle. 

 

Translation for non-techies. It seems that at least some of your onboard folio is managed via POLAR and the credit card processing, at least for cruises that use AUD, is done by First Data both 3rd party products. And Princess wants to stop doing that for some reason (most likely to have more control or to avoid paying those 3rd parties).

 

For my fellow techies, what do you think? IMO they use what I consider to be a reasonable but old-fashioned tech stack where you run all the logic on the backend (using Java/Spring) and it burps out the HTML/CSS/Javascript that you see on the screen. These days the majority of web development job postings I see are for jobs where a Javascript/Typescript framework of some sort (Angular, React, Vue.js) runs on the client and gets data from the backend via APIs.

 

I am wondering if this explains why sometimes princess.com is not very responsive. IME, too much backend processing can lead to 504 errors. Also, IME, using an older tech stack can make it hard to attract quality talent. I've been writing web apps using React, Typescript/Javascript, and GraphQL apis that run on a node.js server for over 8 years now so even though I have done a big application using Java/Spring on the backend, I am totally not interested in this job. (Okay, the fact that it's a contract job doesn't help. LOL)

 

Anyway, I thought it was interesting and some IT/Software Developers on CC might have some opinions about it. I don't consider this private info since I got it from an unsolicited email.