A Rails 3 application running on Postgresql needs to switch to a graph database to be able to grow up. There are many of them and they all offer different kind of API, REST mostly.
I am highly inspired by talks of Emil Eifrem, CEO of NeoTechnologies, about what can be accomplished with Neo4j. I must confess, I've played with it and this thing is absolutely what we need, but there are several obstacles.
REST API is not transactional.
Rails 3 apps are running on ruby 1.9.2, but not jRuby 1.5.3 or 1.6 to achieve native API.
Some databases are also driven by Java and offer REST API, so taking them changes nothing. Someother are not an option for us because of a license or a cost or a lack of team behind them.
I assume I'm missing something, so would appreciate any tip, insight or advice about what are our options and and what can play well for us. Thanks.
You can run Neo4jrb with Rails 3 on jruby 1.6, so that should not be a problem.
To run a transactional (REST) API on top of that you can easily write your own Neo4j-Server plugin/extension that could also use Neo4jrb internally but exposes an API that fits your domain and is less verbose/chatty than the fine grained Neo4j-Server REST API. This should also be easier to consume for your clients as it talks in your terms, vocabulary and use-cases.
We're currently working on creating a generic (j)ruby server extension that is able to consume posted code and make it available as new REST endpoints.
Related
I'm working on a webapp running on Tomcat which using spring-data to connect to a neo4j graph in embedded mode.
I would like to use neo4j server instead of the embedded mode and I am looking for some help to be sure about how to do that.
Some of my application services are quite difficult and combine, in a single transaction, the result of several cypher requests in a dto sent back to the user.
First I thought that I have to create a server unmanaged extension and I think I should follow these following steps.
- Keep my webapp with springMVC and spring security to hold and secure users sessions.
- Regroup all my transactional services in a specific jar my-app.jar
- Use Jax-RS to add a REST access point on each of my service of my-app.jar
- use something like spring restTemplate from my spring controller to call services from my-app.jar
First question : is this way of doing things is the good way ?
Second question : I have many spring injection in my services layer. How can I keep them working (how can I add dependencies in the server extension ?
Then I discovered graphAware and I wonder if I should use it instead.
And finally I just read this post http://jexp.de/blog/2014/12/spring-data-neo4j-improving-remoting-performance/ and it seems that I should use
the SpringCypherRestGraphDatabase (as explain in the bold text at the end of the article).
Well, I'm a little bit lost and I would appreciate any help to use neo4j server instead the embedded mode for my application which contain some complexe transactions.
You have a number of options here and you are on the right track with your thinking.
Option 1:
If your use cases are business-logic-heavy, and your question suggests that they are, going the unmanaged extension route is one option.
Essentially, you can then combine the most performant Java API and Cypher (if you wish) to perform your use case. I wouldn't use SDN here by the way, so you have to do your mapping manually, but is there really any mapping? Maybe you just want to execute traversals / Cypher queries for each one of your use cases.
Each use case then exposes a simple REST API, which is consumed by your Spring-powered application running Spring MVC, Spring Security, and all that. You can use the RestTemplate from Spring in your app's Controllers.
To add a twist to all that, you can use the GraphAware Framework to develop the "unmanaged extension" using Spring MVC as well. That would be my preferred option, knowing nothing about your domain/app.
Option 2:
Use the new version of SDN (v4) as Michael suggests. This allows you to run your application with annotated domain objects, Spring MVC, Security, et al. Operations (CRUD and other) are automatically translated to Cypher and sent across the wire to Neo4j running in server mode (no extensions needed). Results are then marshalled back to Java objects.
We're about to release Milestone 1 of SDN v4. It shouldn't take more than a week. That said, it is still going to be a Milestone release, thus not ready for production. A GA release is expected in May (ish).
You can already try SDN v4 yourself. Clone this repo: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-data-neo4j, make sure you're on the 4.0 branch, and do an mvn clean install on it. Here's a sample app, built using Angular JS and Spring Boot.
Please do get in touch with feedback / questions / problems (best by email info at graphaware dot com). Cheers!
I suggest you wait a bit until SDN4 Milestone 1 comes out (developed by GraphAware) this was written from scratch for Neo4j-Server.
We have a Rails app that acts HTTP API only. On the client side, Ember.js is currently used. We are not overly impressed by Ember and really like the approach Meteor.js takes. So we'd like to exchange the client side with Meteor.js and communicate with the Rails server via websockets that speak the Data Distribution Protocol (DDP), so we can keep using the models, mailers and controllers in Rails. Implementing server side of DDP should be easy.
However, we're unsure how to make Rails talk websockets. We found Reel, which seems to make it easy to accept websocket requests in a standalone environment. Reel seems great as we'd like to implement the DDP on top of the Celluloid stack anyway. But what about running Reel in the Rails environment? Would we need "rails runner" for that? And we'd like to keep using the existing controllers to dispatch incoming requests (like, to add/change/remove resources). Is that even possible without having the request coming through Rack?
Any input is appreciated.
It's a bit late, but I've implemented DDP in Ruby, you can check it out here:
https://github.com/d-snp/ruby-ddp-server
It includes an implementation of EJSON as well. It's built on top of celluloid-websocket, and can be ran simply as a rack app.
I've made an integration with RethinkDB that can be used as a reference to build your own collections implementation.
https://github.com/d-snp/ruby-ddp-server-rethinkdb
I've also made a sample chat application that can be found here:
https://github.com/d-snp/celluloid-rethinkdb-chat
It's something that I have been longing to do as well, to integrate old "legacy" Rails code. Here is the best way I have found:
Since you would not be using any of Rails router/controller/views, but just the ability to read data and push it to the client, I recommend you use Rails to create JSON apis to the database, and deploy the code, then in Meteor you can consume the data via the http package, this would happen on the server at a regular interval and populate the MongoDB with the normalized data you need, then it would serve the browser client.
I am working on such an application that will keep a normalized version of the data in Mongo, and a relational version of the data in mySql (through Rails) this way I can preserve the legacy Rails functionality that I dont want to rewrite in JS, and get the benefit of Meteor for the one page that I need it most.
Is it possible to write soap based web services using ruby on rails framework. If yes, can someone please point to a learning resource
Yes, you can write SOAP web services using Rails, However Rails is moving in favour of a REST web service approach. So my personal opinion is if you are starting a brand new Rails app with SOAP web services, consider some other programming language like JAVA, because that has more tools to easily create SOAP web services.
But nowadays all the webservices going towards REST, because of the simplicity it has. Almost all major sites has a REST API.
Furthermore if you are still planning to go ahead with Rails, savon is an interesting gem that you should probably look at.
I'm trying to consume a SOAP web service, (from SharePoint 2010 if it makes a difference). I'm using Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3. What is the best way to do this? I've read some stuff mentioning Savon http://savonrb.com/ but that is was too new and buggy. Is it still the best solution? Thanks.
I used Savon successfully to interact with the Bullhorn Staffing SOAP based service about six months ago. I didn't have any problems with the Savon Gem, all my headaches came from inconsistencies with the service.
My interactions with their service was limited to getting data (simple) and pushing data, which could include a resume file (more complex). I didn't have to look much further than the Savon doc to figure everything out, which I thought was simple to understand and easy to apply to my particular set of problems.
TLDR; 1 vote for Savon despite what you may have heard.
I used savon to interact with Jira SOAP API and it worked fine.
Is it possible to integrate MS Outlook/Exchange tasks with Rails? I know how to send emails with Rails, but that isn't using anything "special" about exchange, just pointing it at the server.
What is "special" about an Outlook Task and how I can I create/read/update/delete them from Rails. (Even a subset of CRUD would be great.)
PS. I am on a linux based rails system, so solutions that rely on a windows-only function won't work for me.
If you are running Exchange 2007 you should also look at Exchange web services to manipulate things.
I am in the process of building a MS Exchange client access library in Ruby that uses MS Exchange Web services. The code is GPL'd so have at it. Please let me know what kind of issues you have and what other features you'd like to see. It's pretty heavy in development at this point.
http://github.com/zenchild/Viewpoint
Cheers,
Dan Wanek
WebDAV might be the way to go, if you'd like to do it in Ruby. There is a ruby gem call rexchange that can do the trick. However, MSFT is phasing out WebDAV and replacing it with the Exchange Web Services, which is Zoredache suggested. Unfortunately, MSFT only provides API in C# (technically, it's SOAP stuff that is language-agnostic, some Java developers seem to sucessfully build some stuff using EWS, but I have yet known anyone has done this in Ruby.)
Assuming that the tasks are stored in Exchange, you should be able to access the tasks through WebDAV.