[hibernate-dev] Support for Elasticsearch in Hibernate OGM proposal

[Jiri Holusa]

Hi Gunnar,

thanks for your reply, see the comments inline.

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Gunnar Morling" <gunnar at hibernate.org>
> To: "Jiri Holusa" <jholusa at redhat.com>
> Cc: hibernate-dev at lists.jboss.org
> Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2014 8:55:49 AM
> Subject: Re: [hibernate-dev] Support for Elasticsearch in Hibernate OGM proposal

> Hi Jirka,

> Welcome and many thanks for your interest in contributing to our projects!

> 2014-08-20 16:28 GMT+02:00 Jiri Holusa <jholusa at redhat.com>:

>> Hi everybody,
>>
>> I'm Jirka Holusa and I work JDG QA (Infinispan) team, just for you to
>> know, this email has nothing to do with JDG :)
>>
>> Currently, I looking for a nice topic for a diploma thesis and I came
>> across one. I worked with Elasticsearch in my bachelor thesis and I thought
>> it would be nice to integrate it with Hibernate.
>
>
>> So I found Hibernate OGM and thought thaht I would like to develop the
>> Elasticsearch module for Hibernate OGM. I talked to Emmanuel and Sanne and
>> they pretty liked the idea, so they suggested to move the discussion here
>> on dev list.
>>
>
> +1
>
> So for implementing support for a new datastore in OGM, you'd have to
> implement the GridDialect contract basically. This is a very generic
> contract which is responsible for persisting (and reading) tuples
> (representing entities) as well as associations. In addition, there are
> some "facets" which a grid dialect can implement optionally, namely support
> for batching (processing several operations in one atomic datastore
> invocation) and query support.
>
> To get started with CRUD, I'd recommend to take a look at the CouchDB (and
> MongoDB) dialect as I expect ES to be rather similar. For Couch we use
> JAX-RS/Jackson to interact with the store and convert tuples to/from JSON
> documents. I guess some parts of the CouchDB dialect could be extracted and
> shared by both backends.

I see. Ok, I will take a look into the CouchDB and MongoDB implementations and probably take some inspiration :)

>
>> I would love to read all your suggestions/proposals/tip etc. The rough plan
>> is to first implement the JPA API (therefor CRUD operations) and once this
>> is finished, implement search capabilities via Hibernate Search API.
>>
>
> Ironically, search will be the more challenging part. As you know, HSearch
> only supports direct Lucene access at this point. Ideally, that issue would
> be resolved first (a very interesting topic for a diploma thesis on its own
> right ;). Then we could simply plug-in HSearch for full-text queries
> executed via ES. Note that in this case the complete entity can be obtained
> from the search backend, I'm not sure whether that possibility is already
> foreseen in HSearch?
>
> An alternative which may be a bit simpler and give quicker success for
> simplistic queries would be to implement an ES backend of our pluggable
> HQL/JP-QL parser. We already have implementations of this which take HQL
> queries and translate them into corresponding MongoDB/Neo4j queries, so the
> same should be doable for ES. But this wouldn't really carry semantics of
> full-text queries (fuzzy search etc.) as one could get it via HSearch and
> might expect for a backend such as ES.

Hmm, first approach seems to me a better way to do it, but as you said, HSearch has to be
"undependent" on Lucene first. So I will start with CRUD and see where I can get. Maybe
after that, something around HSearch and Lucene will be resolved, so than I could decide
whick approarch to use.

>
>
>> I looking forward to your replies.
>>
>
> Regarding the diploma thesis, how would this exactly work? Are there e.g.
> any restrictions in the ways the code you write as part of this can be
> used, or are we meant to "supervise" parts of the thesis in any way? It'd
> be interesting to learn more about the formal/administrative aspects of
> this.

I'm glad that you're interested :) Well, this idea of making the module to Elasticsearch
comes from my desire to contribute to Hibernate project somehow, so I decided that I would
try to do this. Than I realized I could make a diploma thesis out of it, two birds with a one
stone :)

I am currently starting the master studies, so I have 2 years before my final exams and defence of
diploma thesis. So I thought that I would start coding it and if it goes well, next year I start
writing the thesis about it.

But basically, it works like this. I have to create a thesis intructions that consists of point
I have to check. Than I have to find a "formal" supervisor in university that will usually 
help me with the thesis text. Besides him I can find some advisors that will help me with
technical things. That's because the "formal" supervisor doesn't always have to understand the
topic as much.

Last part is that after finishing thesis I have to find an oponent that will write his opinion
on the thesis. Maybe somebody from hibernate-dev could become him, but that a distant future :)

To summarize, you could "supervise" my work in a way as a contribution. If you help me to make the
code great and it will become integrated and you're satisfied with it, it would be excellent.
Usually the profesors are quite impressed if something is accepted by community and integrated into
the project, so that should do the trick :)

Thanks once again for the feedback,

Jirka

>
> Hope this provides some food for thought. Just ping us here on the list or
> #hibernate-dev on FreeNode to discuss any details.
>
>
>> Cheers,
>> Jirka
>

>> --Gunnar


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