Learn Algolia, Polymer and Tachyons

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

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Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

Polymer is a framework created at Google for building reusable web components.

We use HTML elements every day such as div, a, button, form, and table. All HTML elements provide some sort of API of attributes, properties, methods and events that we use to manipulate them. Generally, web elements are styled in a particular way by default, and also allow us to customize their styling with CSS.

Polymer allows you to build fully custom web elements of your own for more complex components composed of the building blocks you are used to with the standard set of HTML elements.

This course is an introduction to Polymer, and should get you started building your own customizable web elements that you can use on their own, or even with your favorite framework like Angular or React!

The Polymer library provides a set of features for creating custom elements. These features are designed to make it easier and faster to make custom elements that work like standard DOM elements.

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Creating Custom Web Elements with Polymer 2

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

In this lesson we'll look at creating event listeners in our custom element using the listeners object as well as annotated event listeners.

Create Event Listeners in Polymer Elements

Vue (pronounced /vjuː/, like view) is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. The core library is focused on the view layer only, and is very easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects. On the other hand, Vue is also perfectly capable of powering sophisticated Single-Page Applications when used in combination with modern tooling and supporting libraries.

You can easily add CSS libraries to Nuxt using `yarn` or `npm` to install them, then simply adding them to the `nuxt.config.js` so they're included in each page. Then all the classes will be available for use in all of your templates. This lesson walks your through installing a library then adding it to your `nuxt.config.js`.

Add CSS Libraries to Nuxt

Custom element property changes can be observed by specifying an observer method which will be executed whenever a change occurs and receive both the new value and old value.

Observe Property Changes on a Custom Polymer Element

In this lesson we'll look at the lifecycle callbacks (Created, Ready, Attached, Detached, and attributeChanged) available to us in Polymer and how to use each one.

Use Lifecycle Callbacks On Custom Polymer Elements

Polymer provides us a variety of data-binding configurations.  In this lesson we'll look at configuring Two-way, One-way-down and One-way-up data binding.

Data Bind Two Polymer Elements

We can utilize the "fire" method from within our custom element to execute a custom event.  In this lesson we'll create a custom event and pass useful data along with the event to the consumer of our element.

Execute Custom Events in Polymer

In this lesson we'll use the "dom-repeat" helper method in our custom element to iterate over a collection and use the built in model instantiation to update items in our collection.

Iterate over a Collection with Polymer's dom-repeate

In this lesson we'll install Polymer using bower and explore creating our first custom element. We will use the dom-module to create our first Element and add an event listener to watch for the `keyup` event.

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