Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a great open source search engine built on top of Apache Lucene. Its features and upgrades allow it to basically function just like a schema-less JSON datastore that can be accessed using both search-specific methods and regular database CRUD-like commands. It is a real-time distributed search and analytics engine. It allows you to explore your data at a speed and at a scale never before possible. It is used for full-text search, structured search, analytics, and all three in combination:

• Wikipedia uses Elasticsearch to provide full-text search with highlighted search snippets, and search-as-you-type and did-you-mean suggestions.
• The Guardian uses Elasticsearch to combine visitor logs with social -network data to provide real-time feedback to its editors about the public’s response to new articles.
• Stack Overflow combines full-text search with geolocation queries and uses more-like-this to find related questions and answers.
• GitHub uses Elasticsearch to query 130 billion lines of code.

Elasticsearch is much more than just Lucene and much more than “just” full-text search. It can also be described as follows:

• A distributed real-time document store where every field is indexed and searchable
• A distributed search engine with real-time analytics
• Capable of scaling to hundreds of servers and petabytes of structured and unstructured data

And it packages up all this functionality into a standalone server that your application can talk to via a simple RESTful API, using a web client from your favorite programming language, or even from the command line.

Elasticsearch can be used to search all kinds of documents. It provides scalable search, has near real-time search, and supports multitenancy. Elasticsearch is distributed, which means that indices can be divided into shards and each shard can have zero or more replicas. Each node hosts one or more shards, and acts as a coordinator to delegate operations to the correct shard(s). Rebalancing and routing are done automatically.

Another feature is called "gateway" and handles the long term persistence of the index; for example, an index can be recovered from the gateway in a case of a server crash. Elasticsearch supports real-time GET requests, which makes it suitable as a NoSQL solution, but it lacks distributed transactions.

website: https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch

HTML5 Canvas

Canvas element

The canvas element is part of HTML5 and allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images. It is a low level, procedural model that updates a bitmap and does not have a built-in scene graph. Canvas was initially introduced by Apple for use inside their own Mac OS X WebKit component in 2004, powering applications like Dashboard widgets and the Safari browser. Later, in 2005 it was adopted in version 1.8 of Gecko browsers, and Opera in 2006, and standardized by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) on new proposed specifications for next generation web technologies.

Canvas consists of a drawable region defined in HTML code with height and width attributes. JavaScript code may access the area through a full set of drawing functions similar to those of other common 2D APIs, thus allowing for dynamically generated graphics. Some anticipated uses of canvas include building graphs, animations, games, and image composition.

What is HTML Canvas?

The HTML <canvas> element is used to draw graphics, on the fly, via scripting (usually JavaScript).

The <canvas> element is only a container for graphics, it has no drawing abilities of its own. User must use a script to actually draw the graphics.

The getContext() method returns an object that provides methods and properties for drawing on the canvas. Canvas has several methods for drawing paths, boxes, circles, text, and adding images. A canvas is a rectangular area on an HTML page. By default, a canvas has no border and no content.

Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari support <canvas> and its properties and methods.

Canvas vs SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)

SVG is an earlier standard for drawing shapes in browsers. However, unlike canvas, which is raster-based, SVG is vector-based, i.e., each drawn shape is remembered as an object in a scene graph or Document Object Model, which is subsequently rendered to a bitmap. This means that if attributes of an SVG object are changed, the browser can automatically re-render the scene.

How to use Canvas

The following code creates a Canvas element in an HTML page:

<canvas id="canvasSample" width="200" height="200">
This text is displayed if your browser does not support HTML5 Canvas.
</canvas>

Using JavaScript, we can draw on the canvas:

var element = document.getElementById('canvasSample');
var context = element.getContext('2d');
context.fillStyle = 'red';
context.fillRect(30, 30, 50, 50);