This post will show a fast and easy way to add search to your Rails application. We will use Elasticsearch, an open source search engine, and Searchkick, an easy-to-use gem that integrates Elasticsearch with Rails.

Building most single-page applications (SPAs for short) is a two-step process: first you create a JSON API in a backend technology of choice and then you use that API in the JavaScript application. Here we'll be using Ruby on Rails on the backend and AngularJS on the frontend.

Bower is an open source software created by Twitter, which simplifies dependencies management and updating of front-end packages.

When working on web applications we take a lot of supporting technology for granted. We build our code on top of a multi-layered network stack with HTTP as the glue. Each user interaction with our app may cause several HTTP requests that are routed and handled separately, often in parallel.