Deprecating Neo4j support in Gremlin would definitely mark the end of an era. I would be inclined to retain the support so long as it does not represent a significant development burden, but this is only the perspective of a *user* of legacy applications built with Neo4j-Gremlin. There may be others who use Neo4j primarily as a back-end for TinkerPop, not the other way around, and who are content with Neo4j 3.4 indefinitely, or until legacy Neo4j does become unsupportable. If there aren't too many of these dinosaurs, however, then the support will not be missed.
Josh On Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 9:35 AM Cole Greer <cole.gr...@improving.com.invalid> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > Just a quick update on this, I reached out to Michael Hunger (original > author of neo4j-tinkerpop-api-impl) and he confirmed that Neo4j has shifted > their focus away from gremlin support and they have no plans at this time > to make further contributions to the project. Due to a lack of interest > from both our community and Neo4j, I propose we deprecate neo4j-gremlin as > of TinkerPop 3.7.0 with the intention of removing the module from the repo > at a later date. > > Regards, > > Cole Greer > > From: Cole Greer <cole.gr...@improving.com.INVALID> > Date: Friday, July 14, 2023 at 2:38 PM > To: Dev Tinkerpop <dev@tinkerpop.apache.org> > Subject: [DISCUSS] Future of Neo4J-Gremlin > Hi everyone, > > With the addition of transaction support in TinkerGraph in 3.7, I think > now is a good time to reassess the Neo4J-Gremlin module. To the best of my > knowledge, Neo4J-Gremlin historically served 2 primary purposes. First it > acted as a de facto reference implementation of gremlin transactions, and > second it provided a convenient package for users to integrate Neo4J into > the TinkerPop ecosystem (use of gremlin-console, server…). I don’t see a > future for Neo4J-Gremlin in its current state in either of these roles. > TinkerTransactionGraph will be filling the reference implementation role > from now on, and the module has fallen so far out of support that it I > don’t see it offering much value for users either. > > Neo4J support is dependent on neo4j-tinkerpop-api-impl to interface with > Neo4J. This library has not been updated in over 5 years now and is stuck > on Neo4J 3.4 which dropped out of support in 2020. As it stands, the > neo4j-gremlin plugin cannot operate on any modern version of Neo4J and thus > in my opinion, is no longer a viable product for users. > > Without a concrete plan for a significant investment in upgrading > neo4j-tinkerpop-api-impl, I believe we should move to drop support for > Neo4J-Gremlin. > > I would like to ask any users or stakeholders of Neo4J-Gremlin to reply > with their thoughts on the future of the module. I would like to know if > the plugin still provides any value for anyone beyond what I already > captured. If anyone has objections to the deprecation of the module, I ask > that they be raised in this thread. Further I would love to hear if anyone > is interested in driving efforts to modernize and support Neo4J-Gremlin. > > I plan to leave this discussion open for a while to solicit feedback from > as many stakeholders as possible. If there is no objections raised, I will > assume a lazy consensus in favor of the deprecation and removal of > Neo4J-Gremlin from TinkerPop. > > Regards, > > Cole >
