Elasticsearch is designed to be extended with plugins to improve its capabilities. In the previous chapters we installed and used many of them (new queries, REST endpoints, and scripting plugins).
Plugins are application extensions that can add many features to Elasticsearch. They can have several usages, such as:
Adding new scripting language (that is, Python and JavaScript plugins) Adding new aggregation types
Extending Lucene-supported analyzers and tokenizers
Using native scripting to speed up computation of scores, filters and field manipulation
Extending node capabilities, for example creating a node plugin that can execute your logic
Monitoring and administering clusters
In this chapter, the Java language will be used to develop a the native plugin, but it is possible to use any JVM language that generates JAR files.
