From the Symfony UK meetup (http://symfony.org.uk) sponsored by Inviqa
When you have to build a web application, you are often asked to add search. The magnifying glass is something that we now add to wireframes without even knowing what we are going to search.
Postgre’s full-text search features are one road to go down and they’re great. They come with stemming, ranking / boost, support for multiple languages and fuzzy search for misspelling. However, if you are on MySQL, NoSQL or if your application evolves around search, you might need a little more functionality and/or speed. ElasticSearch is fast, offers autocomplete, search alerts, “more like this” queries, geographical and spatial features. And much more.
ElasticSearch has a nice JSON API and there are two PHP libraries for easy integration: Elastica and elasticsearch-php. They both have good feature coverage, but Elastica’s documentation is quite poor. FriendsOfSymfony is actively developing a bundle wrapping Elastica.
This talk draws from the experiences made when developing the Must app which is heavily search focused. It will provide first steps to set up and get started with FOSElastica, explores how to translate the ElasticSearch documentation into Elastica objects, how to go about features that are poorly documented and covers spam and NSFW content detection. It will come with plenty of code examples covering scenarios from a simple search all query to ranking / boost to geo distance and geo bounds.
What a Symfony developer should know about the framework: News, Jobs, Tweets, Events, Videos,...