April 2011 Summaries

The Neo4j team has released a milestone version, Kiruna Stol, which builds upon the 1.3 GA release and offers a more refined development and operations experience for users. The new release refines parts of the codebase to provide a smoother user interface and eliminates general usability annoyances. This milestone is feature compatible with 1.3 but provides a more polished experience. The Neo4j dev team has identified key areas to focus on for future releases, including revisions to the API, investigations into query languages such as Gremlin, Sparql, and Cypher, REST results paging and streaming, and enhancements to SpringDataGraph. The new release is available for download from the Neo4j website and through the Maven repository.

Spring Data Graph is a library that provides simple and convenient access to graph databases from any Spring application, originally developed by Rod Johnson and Emil Eifrem. The library supports property graphs with arbitrary properties, transparent mapping of annotated POJO entities, Neo4jTemplate implementation, different type representation strategies, dynamic type projections, cross-store support for partial JPA, and more. It has been iteratively improved through frequent releases based on community feedback, with a focus on building support for detached entities, in-graph type representation strategies, repository support, and Neo4jTemplate implementation. The library is released under the Apache Software License and its source code is hosted on GitHub, with examples and tutorials available online. Spring Data Graph has been used in various real-world systems, including a large energy market simulation at the Technical University of Delft, and is part of an extensive tutorial in building real-world systems with Spring and Spring Data Graph.

The Spring Data Graph project with Neo4j support is now available in its first release candidate, aiming to simplify the integration of Java and Spring developers with the graph database. The library offers a domain object mapping layer that leverages AspectJ for transparent POJO – graph – mapping, and integrates with the Neo4j-REST server. It also provides a Neo4jTemplate for convenient use of the Spring Template approach, reducing configuration effort through Spring Java Config or existing namespace configuration. A tutorial web application is available for users to explore, and feedback from early adopters has been invaluable in shaping the project's development.