From Solr to elasticsearch by Rob Young.
From the post:
Search is right at the center of GOV.UK. It’s the main focus of the homepage and it appears in the corner of every single page. Many of our recent and upcoming apps such as licence finder also rely heavily on search. So, making sure we have the right tool for the job is vital. Recently we decided to begin switching away from Solr to elasticsearch for our search server. Rob Young, a developer at GDS explains in some detail the basis for our decisions – the usual disclaimers about this being quite technical apply.
I am sure there are points to be made for both Solr and ElasticSearch. No doubt much religious debate will follow this decision.
What interested me was the claim that:
Just about the most important feature of any search engine is the ability to query it. Both Solr and elasticsearch expose their query APIs over HTTP but they do so in quite different ways. Solr queries are made up of two and three letter URL parameters, while elasticsearch queries are clear, self documenting JSON objects passed in the HTTP body.
It is possible, as the example in the post shows, to have “…clear, self documenting JSON objects….” in ElasticSearch but isn’t clarity in that case optional?
Or at least in the eyes of its user?
Not to downplay the important of being “…clear and self-documenting…” but to make it clear that is a design choice. A good one in my opinion but a design choice none the less.
That clarity occurs in this case in JSON is an accident of expression.