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!