Zend
and the art of search
Dave Dash
Spindrop LLC
Minneapolis USA
* I’m a symfony evangelist for any who’ll listen
* I write articles and how-tos on spindrop.us
* I’m the lead developer for reviewsby.us
* I’ve worked on a number of symfony sites, many which boast search powered by Zend

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*
The core symfony framework can do quite a lot
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The greatest strength of symfony is it’s ability to extend beyond the core
*
Plugins
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*
PEAR libraries
*
other frameworks?
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*
In symfony (and other frameworks) we embrace the idea of DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself
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*
Not just in our applications, or the framework itself, but open source PHP in general
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*
If there’s good code available, don’t re-invent the wheel.

bridge = simple
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Even without help, Zend and ezComponents are easy to use within symfony
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But why not build a bridge
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The Bridge is simple, it allows us to call classes from Zend or other frameworks and autoload them
*
That’s it

lucene
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We’re going to specifically look at Zend Search Lucene
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Great way to quickly add a powerful search engine to your web app
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Apache Lucene is a feature-rich, but easy to use search engine library written in Java
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Ported to C, Ruby and of course PHP
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The ports generally use binary compatible libraries, meaning we can write one part of the search in Java and another part in PHP if necessary
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PHP isn’t always the best language for heavy server-side lifting, so we can pull out resource-intensive processes that are unbecoming of a PHP script and use Java to take care of
them. We’ll touch on that later

search = 3 things
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We’ve got a bridge, we’ve got a php library, search is a snap, so let’s talk about adding it to our applications
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There’s three or four things we do with a search engine
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Index records
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Delete records
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Query records
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We do update, but at least with Lucene that involves deleting and indexing
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If you’ve seen the tutorials I have online they are written in a propel-specific manner, this is by no means a requirement, we can very easily use Doctrine or
any type of object we want to index
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If we have time, which we might, I’ll show a demo with the code in action if people would like
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Since our primary task is searching or querying records we’ll start there
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In either our Peer or Table class for our object which we have indexed we’ll want a query method.
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This method loads the search index and uses the Zend Search Lucene library to query
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All these queries will be useless without a built up index
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In our object’s class we override the save method and have it delete all the old records of the object in the index (if any) and create a new one from
scratch using the Zend API
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We store the fields we’d want to search on in the index
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Finally we need to override our delete method for our object and make sure it removes its records in the search index upon deletion

extension

questions?

i can has demo?