October 2010 Summaries

The Neo4j team is excited to announce their presence at Öredev, a conference in Malmö, Sweden, where Jim Webber will discuss REST in Practice and Emil Eifrem will introduce the new Spring Data & NoSQL components with Neo4j as the first fully supported backend. Additionally, Neo4j and MongoDB will co-host an Open event on November 11, focusing on the NoSQL track, allowing attendees to learn more about graph databases and explore their applications using graph technologies.

With the release of Neo4j 1.2 milestone 2, the integrated indexing API provides a more natural part of the GraphDatabaseService, offering a fluent API for creating indexes that can refer to nodes or relationships and perform compound queries. The new indexing is paired with an IndexManager, providing improved performance and faster graph operations. Additionally, this release includes fixes for shutdown problems, kernel optimizations for caching and high-availability, and an increasing suite of integration tests to ensure comprehensive testing.

In following our new bi-weekly release schedule, Neo4j 1.2.M02 has been released with a new integrated index API featuring Lucene as the default implementation. To update your maven pom dependencies, add `<groupId>org.neo4j</groupId><artifactId>neo4j</artifactId><version>1.2.M02</version>` to your project's configuration. The release is available for users to download and start utilizing the new features, including improved index management and query performance.

Spring Data is a project to provide convenient support from the Spring framework for non-relational databases, including graph databases like Neo4j. The collaboration between SpringSource and VMware's Neo4j team aims to make nosql databases first-class members in modern software development. Spring Data includes two projects: Datastore Graph, which provides an annotation-driven POJO-graph mapping library, and the Neo4j Roo Add-On, which enables users to easily build Roo applications backed by Neo4j. Both projects are developed in the open on public git repositories with regularly pushed maven builds, making it easy for developers to get started and use them in their own projects.

The Neo4j team has announced the first milestone towards the upcoming 1.2 release, version 1.2.M01, with a focus on improving usability. This includes introducing a bi-weekly release schedule for new features, deploying artifacts to Maven Central for hassle-free distribution, and implementing new methods for gathering feedback. The goal is to enhance the overall experience of using Neo4j.

The developer team behind Neo4j has acknowledged the need for a more user-friendly experience, particularly for developers using languages other than Java or those embedded in JVM-based projects. To address this, they are rolling out changes to improve product usability, including a new bi-weekly release schedule and feedback mechanisms such as the Usage Data Collector (UDC), which sends pings back home when users run Neo4j. The UDC provides valuable statistics on user behavior, helping the team make data-driven decisions about feature development. Additionally, they have made immediate usability changes, such as renaming the main download to "Neo4j" and publishing artifacts in Maven central repo, aiming to simplify the experience for a broader range of users.