The Neo4j resources library allows you to build an application which stores its data in the [http://neo4j.org/](Neo4j open source graph database) and exposes it through a domain-specific RESTful JSON API which you define. It is written in Scala and is intended to be used in other Scala projects, although you may be able to get it to work with other JVM-based langauges too. Projects using this library can build amazing databases with a minimum of boilerplate and unnecessary code.

Please see the Neo4j Scala template as a starting point for your application based on the Neo4j resources library.

You need a Java 5 (or newer) environment and Maven 2.0.9 (or newer) installed:

$ mvn --version
Maven version: 2.0.10
Java version: 1.6.0_03-p3
OS name: "darwin" version: "9.7.0" arch: "i386" Family: "unix"

To do a full build of neo4j-resources, run the following:

$ git clone git://github.com/ept/neo4j-resources.git
$ cd neo4j-resources
$ mvn clean install

To use this library in your projects, add the following to the dependencies section of your pom.xml:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.eptcomputing</groupId>
  <artifactId>neo4j-resources</artifactId>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

If you don't use Maven, take target/neo4j-resources-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar and all of its dependencies, and add them to your classpath.

To use the project in Eclipse, you must have the Eclipse Scala plugin installed. You should also do a full Maven build before using Eclipse, to ensure you have all the dependencies downloaded. Then you should be able to do "File -> Import -> General -> Existing Projects into Workspace" and be ready to go. Note that at the time of writing, the Eclipse Scala plugin appears to have a bug which causes it not to write any class files to the target directory.

If you're using a Java 6 JDK, you may get an error like "JAXB 2.0 API is being loaded from the bootstrap classloader, but this RI needs 2.1 API" when building this project. You can fix this by setting the following environment variable:

export MAVEN_OPTS="-Djava.endorsed.dirs=$HOME/.m2/repository/javax/xml/bind/jaxb-api/2.1"

Depending on your operating system you may need to to adjust the path above to point to your Maven repository.

Setting everything up to build correctly can be a bit of a nightmare, which is why I have prepared a Neo4j Scala template project to make it easy. It contains the full barebones structure for a Scala web project based on this library, including examples of how to use it and how to test it. (You do test everything, right?)

Copyright (c) 2009 Ept Computing. Developed by Martin Kleppmann.

This library is made publicly available under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE.txt for details.