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.

Neo4j at JAOO 2009 Oct 4 - 8

Emil from the Neo4j crew is right now making the streets of Aarhus, Denmark, unsafe for RDBMS fans. Why? Because Oct 4th is kicking off the week of JAOO 2009!

Emil will give an introductory Neo4j talk in the morning slot of the first day. If you're attending and want a free beer or just discuss some #nosql or graph database goodness, please stop by and say hi!

Neo4j.rb 0.3.2 released

Andreas Ronge, Martin Kleppmann and the other contributors have recently released Neo4j.rb 0.3.2. The project on GitHub now has thirteen forks. The release announcement was sent to the Neo4j Ruby group.

Major points from the changelog:

• experimental support for aggregating nodes
• traversal with traversal position
• addition of the graph-algo AllSimplePaths algorithm
• upgrade to Neo4j-b9 with a Neo4j.all_nodes method added

Neo4j 1.0-b9 released: batch insert mode & new adaptive cache

Neo4j 1.0-b9 — the open source graph database — has been released with new features including a batch insert mode for bulk import, optimized read-only transactions and a new adaptive cache implementation. 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.rb 0.3.0 released - REST support included

Andreas Ronge released a new versions of the JRuby library for Neo4j. The 0.3.0 release focuses on event handling, list support and lots of other things. The really big news this time is the REST API support contributed by Martin Kleppmann. For more information about this release read the full changelog. There's also documentation to read, and you can find out what's going on at the project page.