Remoting Experiments for Neo4j's Cypher

Usage

• right now queries are hard coded in clients

./server.sh [db-dir]
./client.sh
ruby client.rb

Ideas:

Write a Cypher only endpoint for Neo4j that uses a fast transport and serialization across multiple client languages. Cypher Results are streamed from the server. Transaction support. Multithreaded clients and servers Client examples in ruby, python, php, c#, c, javascript, java, scala, clojure, erlang Public installation on Heroku for testing

Serialization

Nodes, Relationships and Paths are converted into maps and lists for serialization recursively

Node : { id : id, [data : {foo:bar}]}
Relationship : { id : id, start: id, end: id, type : "FOO",  [data : {foo:bar}]}
Path {start: node, nodes: [nodes], relationships [relationships], end: node, lenght: 1}

Header with Columns, optional Footer with time, bytes, tx-id, error, exception, rows, update-counts for nodes, relationships, properties.

Compactness

• leave off footer, enable when needed
• ignore results (fire & forget)

Transactions

• provide a "tx" parameter with begin, commit,rollback
• tx-id will be reported in footer
• provie a tx-id parameter with the transaction id
• transaction will be suspended, resumed per request (if a tx-id is provided) and finished and removed at rollback/commit

Serialization

• fast, lightweight, portable

MessagePack

Java

• messagepack-lite (source, build, install in repo)

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/sirbrialliance/msgpack-java-lite
cd msgpack-java-lite
ant
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=net.asdfa -DartifactId=msgpack -Dversion=0.0.1 -Dfile=dist/msgpack-java-lite.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true

PHP

• native pecl extension

git clone https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack-php.git
cd msgpack-php
phpize
./configure && make && make install

add extension=msgpack.so to your php.ini

Ruby

gem install msgpack
```

## Transport

* fast, lightweight, portable

### ZeroMQ

```sh
brew install zeromq
```

#### Java

```sh
git clone https://github.com/zeromq/jzmq
cd jzmq

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install
mvn clean install
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=org.zeromq -DartifactId=zmq -Dversion=2.1.0 -Dfile=src/zmq.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
```

#### PHP

```sh
pear channel-discover pear.zero.mq
pecl install pear.zero.mq/zmq-beta
```

> add `extension=zmq.so` to your php.ini

#### Ruby

```sh
# didn't work: 
sudo gem install zmq -- --with-zmq-dir=/usr/local/ --with-zmq-lib=/usr/local/lib/

# did work https://github.com/chuckremes/ffi-rzmq
sudo gem install ffi ffi-rzmq zmqmachine
```

### Websockets

## Alternatives, Resources

* BSON: http://bsonspec.org/
* Protocol Buffers http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/

### MessagePack

* http://msgpack.org/
* used msgpack implementation: https://bitbucket.org/sirbrialliance/msgpack-java-lite/overview
* https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack-java/blob/master/src/test/java/org/msgpack/TestSimpleArrays.java
* http://blog.andrewvc.com/why-arent-you-using-messagepack discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571729

### ZeroMQ

* http://www.zeromq.org/intro:get-the-software
* http://www.zeromq.org/bindings:java
* https://github.com/imatix/zguide/blob/master/examples/Java/hwserver.java
* https://github.com/imatix/zguide
* zeromq-c: http://api.zeromq.org/2-1:zmq-recv

* ruby installation problems https://gist.github.com/2791766
* https://github.com/andrewvc/learn-ruby-zeromq/blob/master/001_Socket_Types/003_req_rep.rb
* http://www.zeromq.org/blog:multithreading-magic
* http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#Multithreading-with-MQ
* http://sysgears.com/articles/load-balancing-work-between-java-threads-using-zeromq/
* http://zguide.zeromq.org/java:mtserver


### Alternatives:
* Spread http://www.spread.org/ Spread, a asynchronous messaging protocol
* Netty: https://netty.io/ high performance NIO server/client, only for Java/JVM
* Storm (uses ZeroMQ): http://storm-project.net/ Distributed and fault-tolerant realtime computation: stream processing, continuous computation, distributed RPC
* Thrift: http://thrift.apache.org/ Code generator and RPC middleware for cross-language client-server applications