Neo4J as a Grails backend

This post is a reply to @EmilEifrem‘s twition.

Neo4J could be a nice extension as a Grails’ persistence backend, similar to a DB, space or LDAP. The problem today is that GORM is tightly coupled to Hibernate. Looks like @GraemeRocher is in the works of extracting Hibernate as a plugin, from which one can use other persitence plugins. Absolutely looking forward to that. (Graeme, please document what defines the folders which contain domain classes, controllers and views, so they can be changed!).

@Nawroth recommended using Neo4J through a JCR layer, though theres no implementation for Grails or Neo4J. The motivation for this is to be able to use the nice features such as MyPersonNode.find(), trinity.save() … Recommend watching this clip 4 intro to Grails.

What can be done today is just using the Neo4J jar in Grails as it is. But the magic of  GORM that makes Grails so different, compared to regular Java won’t exist…

Groovy does Neo4J thanks to Maven Simplicity

Guillaume Laforge, Groovy Project Manager, kicked off a debate on the Neo4J mailing list with his post Groovy and Neo4J. He stated some examples of how Neo4J could be more Groovy. However, since most Neo4J developers aren’t familiar with Groovy, the topic wasen’t tested out further.

Therefore, with of my L337 skillz in Groovy, Neo4J and Maven, I saw it my destiny to create a simple Neo4J test in a Groovy environment to validate Guillaume’s propositions. Along the way, I had to add some GMaven magic, embedded Neo4J, Mercurial version control and Maven Archetype for distribution. No wonder why I didn’t get this out the door yesterday! 😉

What I’m into right now

I thought I’d post updates on what I’m interested in, to give a glimpse of what I’m looking into and have moved away from. Perhaps I’ll have enough data to create a graph someday 🙂

Up and coming

• Neo4J – A graph store – no more ORMappings
• Qi4J – A composite development framework, a new way of writing Java applications, a way of life
• Groovy GRAILS – Excellent for prototyping Java stuff
• Mercurial – When thinking different, why not Version Control as well?
• Swing Appframework, Java6u10 – Propably the next big thing in Rich Internet Applications
• Visualization of graphs – Am looking for a nice, easy API for creating several hierarchical trees that I can drag and manipulate
• Amazon EC2 – Java enabled servers on demand!
• Twitter, Blog, IRC -New (and revisited) ways of communicating intra-project/company
• javaBin, JavaZone – Working with the JavaZone conference for a year was damn fun!
  

Mavenized Neo4J example

The weekend after JavaZone, I was one of the participants on a “GeekCruise”, where we looked into emerging technologies such as Qi4J, Neo4J and Enterpricy stuff.

In short, Neo4J is a network/graph database that promises to deliver Web 3.0, Semantic Web and RDF greatness.