So the new Neo4J GPL release 1.3 (with added REST) is the release that kind of moves Neo4J out of its niche and into the wider arena. There are less barriers to experimenting with it in production situations and now it is no longer necessary to embed it you don’t have any language barriers, it can just be another piece of infrastructure.

Last week I used the new release to prototype an application and these are my observations. The big thing is that the REST server is easy to use out of the box and the API is well-thought out and practical and it looks like there’s some nice wrappers already for various languages (I used this one for Python).

However compared to other web-based stores there are still a few wrinkles. The first is that it would be nice to clearly be able to mark nodes that you consider “roots” in the graph. It’s almost the first thing you want to do and there should be a facility to support it in the API.

Indexing is still cronky, I think there is a reasonable expectation that Neo4J should be able to have a dynamic index that indexes the properties of nodes as they change without having to explicitly add the indexable fields to the index. I don’t mind if I need to do some explicit work to switch on this mode but having to manage it all explicitly is a huge pain. Particularly because you don’t have any root node support so you are almost inevitably going to want to search before moving over to relationship following.

It would be nice to have list and map properties on nodes, at the moment we’re getting around that by using JSON in the property string but again it feels like a value add that’s necessary if you want to use Neo4J for a big chunk of your data processing.

This is a personal peeve but I do think it would be nice to be able to override the id of a node. One usecase I can definitely think of is when you’re translating a document database into a graph form and you want to cross-reference the two (particularly if you’re using the richer data on the document rather than tranferring it into the node).

One other feature that is a bit strange (but I might be doing this wrong) is that the server seems to correspond to just one database. It would seem pretty easy to incorporate a database-style data-partition name into the REST scheme and allow one server to serve many different databases.

Now that the GPL version is available I am also looking forward to Neo4J entering the Linux package distributions in the same way that CouchDB has become a ubiquitous deployment choice.

So in short Neo4J has left it’s niche but it still hasn’t fully left the ghetto but I have high hopes for the next release.