Hibernate Search by Example

Explore the Hibernate Search system and use its extraordinary search features in your own applications

Overview

• Add search capability to your custom applications
• Integrate with the core Hibernate system, using traditional APIs or JPA
• Write search queries in no time that may be simple or complex

In Detail

Users expect software to be highly intelligent when searching data. Searches should span across multiple data points at once, and be able to spot patterns and groupings in the results found. Searches should be able to fix user typos, and use terms related to the user's search words. Searching is at its best when it pleasantly surprises us, seeming to understand the real gist of what we’re looking for better than we understood it ourselves! Where can we find such a search system and how can we use it efficiently?

Hibernate Search by Example is a practical, step-by-step tutorial, which guides you from the basics of Hibernate Search to its advanced features. The book builds toward a complete sample application, slowly fleshed out to demonstrate each and every concept being introduced in each chapter. By the end you will have a solid foundation for using Hibernate Search in real production applications.

This book starts with a simple example, and incrementally builds upon it to showcase each Hibernate Search feature introduced. By the end of the book you will have a working, functionality-rich application, and a deeper understanding than you might have had from looking at code snippets in a vacuum.

You will learn how to integrate search into core Hibernate applications, whether they are XML or annotation-based, or if you are using JPA. You will see how to fine-tune the relevance of search results, and design searches that can account for user typos or automatically reach for related terms. We will take advantage of performance optimization strategies, from running Hibernate Search in a cluster to reducing the need for database access at all.

Hibernate Search by Example provides everything you need to know to incorporate search functionality into your own custom applications.

What you will learn from this book

• Make core Hibernate entity classes searchable, no matter which mapping API they use
• Write different kinds of search queries by keyword, exact phrase, “fuzzy” search, or searching within a range
• Sort search results by various criteria
• Use pagination to work with and display search results one chunk at a time
• Define custom analyzers to help searches adjust for user typos and recognize related terms
• Fine-tune the relevance of search results through boosting
• Apply conditional indexing logic to exclude certain data from being searchable
• Make Hibernate Search aware of relationships for searches involving data points spread out over multiple classes

Approach

A step-by-step guide for getting started with Hibernate Search, employing a practical example application that will make readers quickly learn and use the excellent search capabilities that the Hibernate Search tool offers.