Category Archives: Technology

FTP to exchange data with clients? There is a better way.

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If we talk to new customers, it seems still a common problem for them to exchange data with their clients. FTP is a prominent solution most customers use today. As one digs deeper into this issue, the hurdles become obvious:
Employees complain about complex setups, and that they always need to involve IT to get permissions and to setup client accounts. Nearly everyone can tell a story about how long it took to get the system up and running. People that are more aware of the technology are seriously concerned about security.

It does not get any better on the client site, they typically receive an FTP server address, a password, and login information. Very often, clients distribute the login to other involved people. Additional effort is necessary to install an FTP client and restrictive Firewalls can even prohibit accessing the server.

To summarize, it is a pain for your employees to setup an FTP  solution, and it is also a pain for your customers to access it. On top, it is not secure at all: Often documents are distributed unencrypted, you are not able to see who updated a document, you cannot spot changes quickly, and you cannot exclude someone, who once received the login password without changing it for everyone else as well.

There is a better way do this… ProBindr: If we need to exchange data with our customers or partners: We create a new Binder on our shelf at useKit.com, add the people who need access to it by simply typing their email addresses, and drop the files, notes or anything else needed into the Binder. And it’s securely done!

Only the people you want to, have transparent access to the data they need. Changes become immediately visible, it is secured by bank level encryption and SSL, it is easy for everyone to understand, and it is affordable.

Keep you and your customers happy with ProBindr.

Free for private use and starting at only $30,–/month for professionals.

 

Binder

Binder

useKit Search with Elasticsearch and Elastica

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Search in web applications is not a feature anymore, it is a basic navigation system. As Google shows us, to navigate to specific sites, users do not try to figure out which domain ending a company has, but just type for example “useKit” into the Google search and click on the first link to navigate to useKit.com. When we started to build useKit it was clear that we need a good search engine to allow our users to retrieve the content in an efficient way, but also for navigation. A good example for this is our auto-complete context navigation in useKit knowledge.

Solr vs. Elasticsearch

We evaluated different systems but it was soon pretty clear that we will choose a solution based on Lucene, as Lucene offered all the features we needed and was under active development. Since most of our application is written in PHP, we needed a solution based on Lucene which allows access with PHP. The final decision was made for solr, which is scalable and offers a REST interface with a JSON API. For more then a year our search was powered by solr.

After a year we added the feature to upload files to the useKit system, and our users started to heavily use it requesting soon that these files are full text searchable too. We started to look around for solutions to do this in solr. It looked like the Apache Tika project offered the features we needed and we started to integrate Tika into our Solr setup but we were facing several problems. These problems caused us to reinspect our search solution and we stumbled over elasticsearch. At this time elasticsearch, developed by Shay Banon was still a young project, but looked promising. After some testing of the general search and especially the mapper-attachement plugin, we decided to move our search to elasticsearch. The decision was less based on the speed, scalability or features of elasticsearch, but more on its simplicity to setup, deploy and its access of the REST interface.

Elastica

As the existing elasticsearch PHP clients did not quite meet our requirements and were not expandable, we started to develop our own elasticsearch PHP client, with the support of Cargo Media, which was open sourced in october 2010 in github under the name Elastica. Since then both, elasticsearch and Elastica heavily evolved. The speed of elasticsearch improved and its automatic sharding and replication allows us to simply run elasticsearch on multiple machines to index all the files uploaded by our users. Also the development of Elastica moved forward with the support of more then 30 external contributors, making Elastica now one of the standard clients for elasticsearch in combination with PHP.

Elastica leverages the REST interface of elasticsearch and data is transfered in the JSON format. We were already familar with REST and JSON as our own service API is also implemented based on REST and JSON. As we implemented Elastica in combination with the Zend Framework, Elastica has a similar structure. Elastica was built with the idea in mind to make it extensible. Elasticsearch evolves fast and with every release new features like query, filter or facet types are added. To extend Elastica with a new query type, only an object has to be added which extends Elastica_Query_Abstract.

To have an elasticsearch instance with file support up and running, only 3 simple steps are needed:

  • Download elasticsearch
  • Install the attachment plugin. Uncompress the elasticsearch package, go into the elasticsearch directory and type: ./bin/plugin install mapper-attachments
  • Start elasticsearch: ./bin/elasticsearch -f

With Elastica it is simple to add a file to your search index and search trough it.
Replace in the code below the file path to a pdf through your own pdf and you’re ready to search.

	$client = new Elastica_Client();
	$index = $client->getIndex('useKit');

	//Creates new index
	$index->create(array(), true);
	$type = $index->getType('file');

	// Creates a new document
	$doc = new Elastica_Document();
	$doc->addFile('content', 'path/to/your.pdf');

	// Adds the document to the index
	$type->addDocument($doc);

	// Index needs a moment to be updated
	$index->refresh();

	// Searchs in the index and returns the results
	$resultSet = $type->search('useKit');

The development of Elastica will go on as we want to deliver the best search solution to our users, so the user has always the results at his finger tips. If you have questions using Elastica, post your questions directly in the Elastica Google Group.