The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post from Lukas White that gets into the details of combining SOLR searching with Solarium to perform geospatial queries.

In a recent series of articles I looked in detail at Apache’s SOLR and Solarium. To recap; SOLR is a search service with a raft of features – such as faceted search and result highlighting – which runs as a web service. Solarium is a PHP library which allows you to integrate with SOLR – whether local or remote – interacting with it as if it were a native component of your application. If you’re unfamiliar with either, then my series is over here, and I’d urge you to take a look. In this article, I’m going to look at another part of SOLR which warrants its own discussion; Geospatial search.

He uses a simple example, locating airports near a given location, to give a more "real world" idea of how it all works. He starts by introducing the concept of geospatial searching and the idea of "points" as they relate to a specific location. He then gets into the actual setup of the application, including the SOLR schema configuration and making the queries on the data. The Solarium library allows for simple location queries when given just the "latlong" helper type and the location/distance to use for the starting point. He uses the data from the OpenFlights service to gather the airport data and creates a search form and basic list output of the results from searches on it. If you'd like to see the end result in action, check out this demo website.