An ember-data adapter for Neo4j
This is an experiment and it is not completed at all.
This is the result of a challenge at the Toronto Javascript Hack Night. The goal was to be able to perform CRUD operations between a Neo4j database and ember-data without a backend in the middle.
This functionality may be interesting for the flexible schema possibilities that Neo4j offers. It would be possible to create and modify Ember models without database migrations or API updates.
Neo4j is really flexible with data types. They are not even required. However, my idea was to allow the creation of models with it. The solution was to use Neo4j node labels as the model class. Any other model field will be stored as a node property.
It is possible to specify DS.Models in an Ember application and the adapter will be able to persist them. The operations currently supported are:
- Find all the nodes of a given type
- Find a node by ID
- Create a node of a given type
- Update node fields (properties)
- Delete a node
You will obviously need a Neo4j server. If you install it locally you need to allow cross-domain requests. This can be done editting the neo4j-server.properties and uncommenting the line:
org.neo4j.server.webserver.address=0.0.0.0
If your server is not running at http://localhost:7474/db/data/ you need to set the host property in the adapter.
I didn't have the time to add relationships support but if I have the chance I will.
I added a hideous app to test the adapter. It only has the Movie model and it's plain ugly HTML, but it does show how to use the adapter. You can run it with a simple HTTP server:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Only nodes are working so a lot of stuff needs to be added. I think that it will be interesting to transform Ember findQueries into Neo4j traversals.
- Ember: 1.3.1
- Ember-data: 1.0-beta5
- Neo4j: 2.0.0
All the Neo4j REST API can be checked here