Elasticsearch is a distributed and scalable data platform written in Java that, besides the transport protocol (Java to Java), offers a very complete REST API accessed through JSON. This talk will cover the details of the Elasticsearch client we built for Lua as a part of the GSoC program in the LabLua organization.

By using the elasticsearch-lua client a programmer can access most Elasticsearch functionalities and benefit from: proper load balancing across all nodes with pluggable and multiple selection strategies; a connection pool; and the reindex feature (not available in Elasticsearch).

We will also show how this client could be used to implement a search feature in a website that is based on a SQL database, and how can we use the data in Elasticsearch to also perform fast analytics.