Neo4j Graph DatabaseFrom PHP

February 28, 2013

Confoo 2013, Montral

About me

Writing PHP since... 2001?

Consultant since 2006

Graduated in software engineering in 2008

How I got here

R.I.P.Had a short life, but left before it was too late.

Why Neo4j?

Simple set-up

Well documented

Open source

... with Enterprise support

Not purely academic

What is a graph database?

A database providing persistance for graphs.

Ok, but what is a graph?

Ok, but what is a graph?

Ok, but what is a graph?

Many to many relations

Properties on nodes and relations

Path finding algorithms

Neo4jOut of the Box

Data: http://www.neo4j.org/develop/example_data

Gremlin

Provides control over the traversal algorithm

Pipe & Filter similar to jQuery

Works across different graph databases

Based on Groovy (limited to Java)

Gremlin

g.v(1) .in('COMPANION_OF') .out('APPEARED_IN') .has('title', "The Doctor's Daughter") .back(2)

Gremlin

g.v(1) .in('COMPANION_OF').as('companion') .out('APPEARED_IN') .has('title', "The Doctor's Daughter") .back('companion')

Gremlin

Can modify the graph

Allows to run arbitrary code

Implementation not as stable in Neo4j

Cypher

The SQL for graph databases

Simpler to read

Neo4j only

Well supported

Cypher

START doctor = node(1)MATCH doctor episodeWHERE episode.title = "The Doctor's Daughter"RETURN companion, companion.character

Enough theory

Neo4j in action

Accessing from PHP

REST API

JSON over HTTP

Well supported

Used by the web admin

Meaningful work requires many HTTP requests

http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/stable/rest-api.html

everyman/neo4jphp

Complete? REST API implementation

Basic wrappers for all components

https://github.com/jadell/neo4jphp/wiki

everyman/neo4jphp

Pros:Well maintained

Good documentation

Predictable behavior

Cons:Tedious API

Error-prone

Low-level

hirevoice/neo4jphp-ogm

Bias: I am the author

Inspired by Doctrine

Uses annotations on classes

Built on top of everyman/neo4jphp

https://github.com/lphuberdeau/Neo4j-PHP-OGM

hirevoice/neo4jphp-ogm

Pros:Fast (bulk operations)

Feels like Doctrine

Benefits from type checking

Well tested

Bundles and modules available (many)

Cons:Supported by me

Skim documentation

Implementation still partial

Others

neoxygen/updown

neoxygen/neox

neoxygen/GraphQuest

Demo

Codehttps://github.com/lphuberdeau/confoo-demo

Louis-Philippe Huberdeaulp@huberdeau.info

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