Technology scout

Since Stefan Armbruster is a bit short of time to update the documentation of the Neo4J plugin for Grails I thought I start a short series of postings describing my progress in using Neo4J as a graph database for a Grails based application. I will use the REST API of Neo4J and not the embedded version.
Like always it starts with additions to grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy. First we need to add the Neo4J maven repository to the repositories section:
[pyg l=”groovy”]repositories {
// …
mavenRepo ‘http://m2.neo4j.org/content/repositories/releases/’
} [/pyg]
Then I set my versions:

[pyg]neo4jVersion=”2.0.3″
neo4jRestVersion=”1.9″[/pyg]

 
Now we need to declare the dependencies:
[pyg]dependencies {
//…
compile “org.neo4j:neo4j-community:$neo4jVersion”
compile group:”org.neo4j”, name:”neo4j-graphviz”, version: neo4jVersion
runtime group:”org.neo4j”, name:”neo4j-shell”, version: neo4jVersion
runtime “org.neo4j:neo4j-rest-graphdb:$neo4jRestVersion”
}[/pyg]

En bloc that looks like this (caveat: this code block also installs the angularjs plugin!):

[pyg]grails.project.dependency.resolver = “maven” // or ivy
grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
// inherit Grails’ default dependencies
inherits(“global”) {
}
log “error”
checksums true
legacyResolve false

repositories {
    inherits true // Whether to inherit repository definitions from plugins

    grailsPlugins()
    grailsHome()
    mavenLocal()
    grailsCentral()
    mavenCentral()
    // uncomment these (or add new ones) to enable
    // remote dependency resolution from public Maven repositories
    //mavenRepo "http://repository.codehaus.org"
    //mavenRepo "http://download.java.net/maven/2/"
    //mavenRepo "http://repository.jboss.com/maven2/"
    mavenRepo 'http://m2.neo4j.org/content/repositories/releases/'
}

neo4jVersion="2.0.3"
neo4jRestVersion="1.9"

dependencies {
    // runtime 'mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.29'
    // runtime 'org.postgresql:postgresql:9.3-1101-jdbc41'
    test "org.grails:grails-datastore-test-support:1.0.2-grails-2.4"

    compile "org.neo4j:neo4j-community:$neo4jVersion"
    compile group:"org.neo4j", name:"neo4j-graphviz", version: neo4jVersion
    runtime group:"org.neo4j", name:"neo4j-shell", version: neo4jVersion
    runtime "org.neo4j:neo4j-rest-graphdb:$neo4jRestVersion"
}

plugins {
    // plugins for the build system only
    build ":tomcat:7.0.55"

    // plugins for the compile step
    compile ":scaffolding:2.1.2"
    compile ':cache:1.1.8'
    compile ":asset-pipeline:1.9.9"

    compile ":angularjs:1.0.0"

    // plugins needed at runtime but not for compilation
    runtime ":hibernate4:4.3.6.1" // or ":hibernate:3.6.10.18"
    runtime ":database-migration:1.4.0"
    runtime ":jquery:1.11.1"

}

}[/pyg]

This will get you started with the integration itself. In the next posting I will show, how to access data in the Neo4j database from a controller.