At 16:54 +0200 8/2/09, Anders Nawroth wrote:
> Thanks for your valid points and for helping out on the wiki
> (I just saw your edits)!
And thank you for the gracious and positive response!
> I think we do need to make the language bindings of Neo4j more visible
> to newcomers. The fact that Neo4j is written in Java doesn't imply that
> you have to know or use Java to use the database.
Agreed. I'm interested in (J)Ruby and Scala, but I could imagine folks in
all sorts of languages wanting to play. So, we should structure the docs
in a way that can expand to handle arbitrary languages. Complicating the
matter further, we should also handle multiple OS platforms and development
environments (eg, Eclipse, Maven).
> Regarding setting up Neo4j, the core database engine is embedded into
> applications and thus the Neo4j Java API is how you get at it. - The
> different language bindings will have different setup procedures and
> thus their own setup HowTo. I guess we have to add this somewhere in the
> docs: it's not like using a client/server oriented DB, where the server
> and the clients are installed separately.
I would suggest something like the following as setup pages:
Setup HowTo - general information on what is needed to make use of
Neo4j (eg, Java, Neo4j, and possibly other language support).
Java Setup HowTo - how to install Java on multiple OS platforms. This can
be pretty skeletal, mostly pointing off to other (eg, web) resources.
Can assorted development environments could also be handled here?
Neo4j Setup HowTo - how to install Neo4j on multiple OS platforms. This
can have breakout sections for each major OS flavor. I'd like to see
this get as far as a "Hello World", as a sanity check.
JRuby Setup HowTo - how to install JRuby on multiple OS platforms. This
should also take things as a far as a "Hello World". Parallel HowTos
can then be written for Perl, Python, Scala, etc.
I plan to create stub versions for each of these this afternoon. We can
then decide whether they will serve our needs, how to improve them, etc.
> For the future I'll have to put on my non-java-developer glasses and
> review the docs from that point of view! Maybe we need more docs that
> are language agnostic, focusing on "thinking in Neo4j"?
Yes, but I don't think we need to avoid using Java code entirely. I was
able to follow the slides in Emil Eifrem's talk at OSCON, based on my
general familiarity with C, Ruby, etc. Java is tedious (IMHO), but not
particularly hard to read.
The biggest pitfalls for Javaphobes are likely to lie in setup, language
bindings, and the (enormous) Java infrastructure.
-r
--
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume [email protected]
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841
Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development
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