Chapter 1, Your First Application, dives straight away into creating a Hibernate Search application, an online catalog of software apps. We will create one entity class and prepare it for searching, then write a web application to perform searches, and display the results. We will walk through the steps for setting up the application with a server, a database, and a build system, and learn how to go about replacing any of those components with other options.
Chapter 2, Mapping Entity Classes, adds more entity classes to the example application, which are annotated to demonstrate the foundational concepts of Hibernate Search mapping. By the end of this chapter, you will understand how to map the most common entity classes for use with Hibernate Search.
Chapter 3, Performing Queries, expands the example application's queries, to make use of the new mappings. By the end of this chapter, you will understand the most common Hibernate Search query use cases. By this point, the example application will have enough functionality to resemble many production uses of Hibernate Search.
Chapter 4, Advanced Mapping, explains the relationship between Lucene and Solr analyzers, and how to configure an analyzer for more advanced searches. It also covers adjusting a field's weight in the Lucene index, and determines at runtime whether to index an entity at all. By the end of this chapter, you will understand how to fine tune entity indexing. You will have a taste of the Solr analyzer framework, and a grasp of how to explore its functionality on your own. The example application will now support searches that ignore HTML tags, and that find matches for related words.
Chapter 5, Advanced Querying, dives deeper into the querying concepts introduced in Chapter 3, Performing Queries, explaining how to get faster performance through projections and results transformation. Faceted searching is explored, as well as an introduction to the native Lucene API. By the end of this chapter, you will have a much more robust understanding of the querying functionality offered by Hibernate Search. The example marketplace application will now use more lightweight, projection-based searches, and have support for organizing the search results by category.
Chapter 6, System Configuration and Index Management, covers Lucene index management, and provides a survey of the advanced configuration options. This chapter dives into some of the more common options in detail, and provides enough background for us to explore others independently. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to perform standard management tasks on the Lucene index used by Hibernate Search, and we will understand the scope of additional functionality available to Hibernate Search through configuration options.
Chapter 7, Advanced Performance Strategies, focuses on improving the runtime performance of Hibernate Search applications, through code as well as server architecture. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to make informed decisions about how to scale a Hibernate Search application as necessary.