Neo4j visualization with Gephi

During the summer Martin Škurla has developed support for the Neo4j graph database in the Gephi visualization and exploration platform. This Google Summer of Code project is now approaching its finish.

The basic idea of the project is twofold:

1. Users of Neo4j get better visualization support
2. Users of Gephi can work with larger graphs

The graph visualization can give you output like this:

Martin just published an article summarizing the project, head over and read it! For the future development of the Neo4j plugin, there's a survey where everyone has the chance to give feedback on what features they want to use.

To try it out, download NetBeans 6.9 and use it to build and execute the source code (Gephi depends on the NetBeans platform version 6.9). To check out the source, make sure to have Bazaar installed, and then do:

bzr checkout lp:~bujacik/gephi/support-for-neo4j

Finally, you're welcome to discuss the plugin on the Neo4j mailing list and in the Gephi forums.

Update: See the comments for information on configuring NetBeans to build Gephi!

NOSQL summer in Malmö!

Hi all,
the summer is finally here, and with it soooo much spare time. Why not meet up with some peeps and discuss some of the cool new paradigms of database technology popping up in the NOSQL space?

Tim Anglade has been taking up the flag and is pulling off the NOSQL summer. If you are up for some cool discussions, join one of the places! NeoTechnology is providing space and beer for a first meetup 16th of June in Malmö. We are starting off the the Amazon Dynamo paper, a classic in new data thinking. If you are in Sweden or Denmark, ping us on the list and come along!

Neo4j Standalone REST server 0.8 available

The Neo4j team is proud to announce the availability of a REST wrapper that can be installed both on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as a standalone server. Please follow the Getting Started guide on the Neo4j wiki where you'll find download links, the Matrix-REST example is available over here.

This makes the interaction with the Neo4j graph database from PHP, .NET and other languages like Perl a lot easier. Let us know how things work out via the Neo4j mailing list!

Google Summer of Code Projects with Neo4j

Great news for all students wanting to spend the summer hacking on Neo4j and getting paid for it! The hackers behind Neo4j have teamed up with a few mentoring organizations on some interesting Summer of Code projects!

So far there are two proposed projects involving Neo4j, but more projects could be added in the next couple of days. You could of course also come up with a cool project on your own and propose it to one of the mentoring organizations.

The first project we have proposed is a collaboration with the uDIG project. This project is part of our greater effort of making Neo4j capable of being a fully featured spatial database. The sweet spots are complex spatial algorithms such as routing, spatial analytics and N-dimensional indexing. This summer of code project will aim at implementing the OpenGIS and GeoTools standard interfaces. This will make Neo4j a drop-in alternative to other GIS backends, such as PostGIS, MySQL Spatial and Oracle Spatial.

The second project we have proposed is a collaboration with the Gephi project. What we aim for here is to make Gephi able to visualize graphs straight out of a Neo4j graph (not just exporting data from Neo4j and importing it in Gephi). This will enable Gephi to work with larger graphs than today, which is a direct benefit for Gephi. It will also enable Gephi to be used as a visualization tool for Neo4j based applications, for introspection, data debugging and graphical reporting.

This will be a truly great summer for Neo4j and the lucky students who get selected for these projects. There's a lot of interest in both GIS and visualization in the Neo4j community, so we look forward to great discussions around these projects! Mark March 29 in your calendar and submit your proposal early!

Update on Neo4j Ruby bindings

During 2010 there's been two releases of the Neo4j.rb JRuby bindings for the Neo4j graph database so far. Time to catch up with what's new!

Version 0.4.0 of Neo4j.rb came with improved traversal performance, more options on how to use relationships, for instance relationships can now be indexed. Version 0.4.1 gave us migrations and access to a batch inserter for big import-once data volumes.

In the last days of 2009, neo4jr-simple was first released. It's a simple ready to go wrapper for Neo4j and currently in version 0.2.1. Make sure to check out the neo4jr-social example application as well!

Great thanks to Andreas Ronge, Matthew Deiters and all the other contributors for the awesome stuff!

Neo4j 1.0 released

Recently version 1.0 of Neo4j was released. There has been a Neo Technology news post regarding this event, as well as a blog post on how to get to know Neo4j. The distribution is available as binary and source packages from the downloads page.

For more information, read the list mail announcement and check out the details in the changelog.

A few pointers to stuff that happened around and after the release:

• InfoWorld article: Databases primed for social networks
• MyNoSQL blog: Get a Taste of Graph Databases: InfoGrid and Neo4j
• A Neo4j plugin for Griffon has been created, with a sample application as well
• Peter Neubauer on Neo4j - a graph database Chariot TechCast by Ken Rimple

As always, feedback to the mailing list, on Twitter or directly to us.

Neo4j 1.0-b11 released: stability & robustness

Neo4j 1.0-b11 — the open source nosql graph database — has been released. This is the last beta before we (after 6 years in commercial 24/7 production use) finally feel that we have a version that is worthy of 1.0. This means that the main focus of this release is stability and robustness rather than features. Having said that, Neo4j 1.0-b11 still includes amongst other things a new batch inserter version that implements the NeoService API (to minimize the impact of first-time imports on the rest of your code) and a lot of cleanup and improvements of the indexing utilities.

Download the Neo4j Core release or the Apoc bundle here.

For more information, read the list mail announcement and check out the details in the changelog.

As always, feedback to the mailing list, on Twitter or directly to us.

Neo4j 1.0-b10 released: read-only mode & faster deep traversals

Neo4j 1.0-b10 - the open source nosql graph database - has been released with new features including a read-only mode, improved depth first traversal speed due to an iterator implementation all the way down to the native store layer and faster recovery process when starting up after a crash. Download the Neo4j Core release or the Apoc bundle here.

For more information, read the list mail announcement and check out the details in the changelog.

As always, feedback to the mailing list, on Twitter or directly to us.

NoSQL East & semweb meetup in DC

Emil will represent Neo4j at two upcoming event: Emil and Tim Berners-Lee -- I'm sorry Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web -- will speak at the semantic web meetup in association with ISWC in Washington DC on Oct 27 2009.

After that, we're heading straight to nosql east where our commercial backer Neo Technology will sponsor the conference and Emil will give a Neo4j talk.

If you're attending either one or are just in the area, please ping us so we can grab a beer.

Initial release of Neo4j Grails plugin

As announced by Stefan Armbruster on the Neo4j and Grails mailing lists, the initial 0.1 version of the Neo4j Grails plugin has been released by him. Read the full announcement in this blog post. Grails is a web application framwork based on the Groovy langauge. At the moment the plugin has support for the basic CRUD operations and also exposes the underlying node of each domain object through a property.

Different people have requested such a plugin previously, so it's exiting news that the plugin now exists.

Stefan has also provided example code for how to use the plugin. Basic domain classes may look like this:

class Author { 
    String name
    Date dob
    static hasMany = [ books: Book ]
}

class Book {
    String title
    static belongsTo = [ author:Author ]
}

After adding a little data to the domain the node space will look like this (click for bigger version):

Further information is found on the Neo4j wiki Grails page.