After hearing about Neo4J at Ruby Manor I decided to have a play around with the graph database but for me playing doesn’t mean creating a whole Java project anymore. Since using Python/Ruby/Scala I want to be doing it in an interactive session.

I had quite a few issues getting Neo4J to run but the summary is that for convenience you want all three jars from the distribution in your classpath and you pass a String representing a directory path to the EmbeddedNeo constructor. Once you do have it running make sure to shutdown the database on an exception otherwise you will have to shutdown the JVM (i.e. close the whole Groovy Console session) to unlock the underlying file resources.

Okay so once you have the right jars you can now start playing around with Neo4J. I immediately felt that the library is actually quite heavy with a lot of ceremony to get things done. Some of the feedback I have been hearing from Neo Technology and the Neo4J list is that Neo4J is more of a low-level infrastructure component that is meant to be wrapped up in higher-level APIs.

Working with Groovy it should be possible to cut that ceremony down a bit and put a nicer front-end on things. The first thing I’ve tried is using closures to execute code in Neo database and transaction contexts.

If you have the three jars in your .groovy/lib directory you should be able to run this script from the Groovy Console and have it create a node in your directory. It will be the same node each time but I have some ideas for using builders for both nodes and traversers (which allow you to search the graphs) and I am going to work on (and post) them later.