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Going into our interview with Shay Banon we didn't know much about Elastic Search. I know I for one hadn't realized it was a completely Open Source project, I think the .com in the web address threw me. Coming out of the interview both Jason and I were really impressed by the project.
Elastic Search is a project that takes Lucene, distributes it and wraps it up in a very convenient RESTful API. Essentially you "index" (i.e. insert) JSON documents into Elastic Search and you can retrieve those documents and both tasks can be done via REST.
The applications for such a project are really enticing. For instance, wouldn't it be great if a web designer who's really comfortable with JQuery could write an entire web application without having to bother a Developer to write server-side code to persist and retrieve data? Since they'd be persisting and retrieving JSON documents from Elastic Search directly from JQuery it's all Javascript to them.
Now, what about mobile applications? A big trend in Mobile apps is to make the application running on the Phone (or other mobile device) act simply as a presentation tier. All the heavy lifting and data representation is done via a web service running on a server which the mobile app communicates with. Elastic Search can be spun up on a server and instantly you have a service your mobile app can communicate with to store and retrieve data in a simple to use fashion.
Elastic Search also supports multi-node instances, sharding and other distributed and cloud methodologies which ensure your app can scale.
I for one know the next time I need to produce a prototype of a product, Elastic Search will be my first choice for storage and retrieval of data. I also have the funny feeling it will be retained for the production version of the product as well.
