implementing search using java technology(java web)

Question

I want to implement a search functionality in my web application that I am building using java technology. I would have to search through the database, depending on the user query and will display the results. Which way can I go about doing this(please take note I am using java technology)??.Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use a product like http://lucene.apache.org/core/ or http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ for this instead of writing this on your own.

Lucene is a high-performance search engine for documents. SOLR is built on top of Lucene and provides additional features (like hit highlighting, faceted search, database integration or rich document (Word, PDF, ..) search)

Lucene will analyze your text data and build up an index. When performing a search you run a lucene query against this index.

Answer 2

Assuming you mean free text searching of the data in the database...

For free text searching Lucene and/or SOLR are very good solutions. These work by creating a separate index of the data in your database. It is up to you to either pull the data from the database and index it using Lucene/SOLR or arrange your code that writes to the database to also update the Lucene/SOLR index. Given what you have said it sounds like this is being retrofitted to an existing database so pulling the data and indexing it may be the best solution. In this case SOLR is probbaly a better fit as it is a packaged solution.

Another option would be Hibernate Search . Again this would be a solution to use if you are starting out. It would be more difficult to add after the fact.

Also bear in mind some databases support free text searching in addition to normal relational queries and could be worth a look. SQL Server certainly has text search capabilities and I would imagine other databases have some sort of support. I am not too sure how you access these but I would expect to be able to do it using SQL via JDBC. It is likely to be database specific though.

If you just mean normal SQL searching then there are a whole load of Java EE technologies, plain JDBC, Spring templates, ORM technologies (JPA, JDO, Hibernate etc). The list goes on and it would be difficult to suggest any particular approach without a lot more info.