Book Image

Learning Neo4j 3.x - Second Edition

By : Jerome Baton
Book Image

Learning Neo4j 3.x - Second Edition

By: Jerome Baton

Overview of this book

Neo4j is a graph database that allows traversing huge amounts of data with ease. This book aims at quickly getting you started with the popular graph database Neo4j. Starting with a brief introduction to graph theory, this book will show you the advantages of using graph databases along with data modeling techniques for graph databases. You'll gain practical hands-on experience with commonly used and lesser known features for updating graph store with Neo4j's Cypher query language. Furthermore, you'll also learn to create awesome procedures using APOC and extend Neo4j's functionality, enabling integration, algorithmic analysis, and other advanced spatial operation capabilities on data. Through the course of the book you will come across implementation examples on the latest updates in Neo4j, such as in-graph indexes, scaling, performance improvements, visualization, data refactoring techniques, security enhancements, and much more. By the end of the book, you'll have gained the skills to design and implement modern spatial applications, from graphing data to unraveling business capabilities with the help of real-world use cases.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Building an extension project


The kind people at Neo4j are always keen to ease the workload of their users, so they have created a Maven-based template project on GitHub for us to get a quickstart on our functions and procedures. This way, no time is wasted looking for the dependencies.

Cheers guys!

The project is hosted at https://github.com/neo4j-examples/neo4j-procedure-template. You can either download or clone it, and then open your copy in your favorite Java IDE. In the pom.xml file, update the neo4j.version property with the value corresponding to the version of the Neo4j server that you use. In my case, it is the following:

<properties>
  <neo4j.version>3.2.0</neo4j.version>
</properties>

Build the project with your IDE. There should be no error at this stage. We will use the same project for all kinds of code we will write.

Creating a function

This is not rocket science, a function is just a method in a Java class. This method must be annotated with @UserFunction...