Month: August 2016

Do you want to draw a graph in HTML? Are you a backend developer and not a UI developer? How will you go with this? You will surely search for some available library to draw a graph even if graphs are simple. In our project, we also have simple bar and line graphs for weekly and monthly tracking respectively. Initially our UI team designed bar graphs. As is often the case, after few days there was a requirement of line graphs.

I was worried about timelines. We had an option to ask UI team to give us the static graph and integrate the API. But we would need to explain them the requirement in detail and the design. This process seem too time consuming. So I thought, that instead of wasting time in that, it would be better to work on this and learn something new. So I decided to work on this new…

There are plenty of indexing/search servers available out there like Solr, Sphinx, Elasticsearch, Google Search Appliance and many more.

But out of all the above, Elasticsearch is gaining more attention to it because of it’s popularity. This post is going to tell you only about it and it’s integration in Rails.

So, how would someone describe what an Elasticsearch is ?

From God’s perspective, it’s an open source, distributed, RESTful, search engine i.e. it has a very advanced distributed model, speaks JSON natively, and exposes many advanced search features, all seamlessly expressed through JSON DSL and REST API’s.

♦ Inception

Standard way of using ES in any application is to use it as a secondary data store i.e. data will be stored in some kind of SQL/NoSQL database and then continuously upserting required documents from it into ES, pretty neat.

Some of us might think why not use database itself…