Developer

The Neo4j Driver Hackathon at GraphConnect San Francisco

October 7, 2013

3 min read

Hi all,

We are all still totally stoked after 2 days of intense development work at the inaugural Neo4j driver authors hackathon. Thank you all for joining us in San Francisco and the San Mateo Neo Technology office and sorry Michael Klishin that it didn’t work for you to come!

Many of us saw each other for the first time, and it was a perfect kick-off to GraphConnect San Francisco on Friday.

With the invitation we wanted to extend a small thanks to some of the most prolific members of the Neo4j community.

Being together, we hoped to dedicate some time to bring the Neo4j drivers up to speed with the Neo4j 2.0 release and the developments in the data model (Labels, Indexes), Cypher HTTP endpoints, Neo4j-Browser and other interesting things.

We also had some great discussions on the Neo4j roadmap with Philip providing feedback from some of the most insightful Neo4j users worldwide.

Aseem, we’re sad you got ill, we hope you get better soon, impressive progress anyway!

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The Hackathon attendees:
Back row: Nigel Small, Tobias Lindaaker, Max DeMarzi, Jason McAllen, Stefan Armbruster, Michael Hunger, Tatham Oddie, Andreas Ronge, Elad Olasson, Philip Rathle, Javier de la Rosa
Front row: Josh Adell, Aseem Kishore, Peter Neubauer, Matt Luongo, Wes Freeman

The driver progress summary

It’s been a productive 2 days, let’s sum up the progress we made:

Michael Klishin

Release of Neocons 2.0.0-beta2 supporting Neo4j 2.0 features like Transactions

Nigel Small

basic implementation of Cypher transactions in py2neo:
Geoff parser (v2) converted from Python to JVM (Groovy) ready for updated server plugin

Andreas Ronge

The neo4j-core Ruby gem (used by neo4j.rb gem): a simple unified api now works in both JRuby via the embedded Neo4j API and via the transactional Cypher server endpoint
Improved transaction support using the Neo4j server transaction endpoint.

Stefan Armbruster

started work on a new, Neo4j 2.0 compatible version of the Neo4j Grails plugin
new plugin version will use Cypher only and therefore performance is exptected to be much better when used remotely
so far, 8 out of ~35 test classes of the GORM TCK are passing

Javier de la Rosa (neo4jrestclient, Python)

updated tests to make them work with the last 2.0.0.M06
removed the old syntax for creating relationships based on neo4j.py
dropped support for Python 2.6 and prepared the path for Python 3.3
implemented full support for labels (but not still for batch operations)
started the work for Cypher transactions
started the work for .filter on labels that run Cypher queries underneath

Aseem Kishore (node-neo4j)

caught up on outstanding bugs and feature requests, particularly around indexing
started work on Neo4j 2.0 support (transactional Cypher endpoint, and labels)
begin planning node-neo4j 2.0 (rethinking of API, esp. around Cypher-only)

Wes Freeman (AnormCypher)

released 0.4.3 (supports 2.0 minus transactional), integration tests against M05

Peter Neubauer

updated the Neo4j Geoff plugin to Neo4j Server 2.0 and fixed the tests

Michael Hunger

updated the Neo4j JDBC driver for Neo4 2.0

Tatham Oddie (the token Windows guy):

Neo4jClient for .NET
- Added support for newer Cypher clauses that have shown up in Neo4j 2.0
- Made good progress on supporting transactional Cypher within the standard .NET convention of using (new TransactionScope) {}; some final scenarios to support before I land the branch
Prototyped Cypher integration in Excel: https://twitter.com/tathamoddie/status/385833088091041792
Worked on improving Neo4j on Windows, with the aim of replacing the ageing .bat files with .ps1 equivalents. The first step was working out how to resolve Java on Windows with any degree of reliability: https://gist.github.com/tathamoddie/6817880

We really hope that we can do this every year from now on – join the team and start hacking!

~Peter

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