Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6. Spring Data and Neo4j
Ease of development and availability of tools/technologies for
Rapid Application Devel-
opment
(
RAD
) is one of the key factors in the adoption of new technologies.
There is always a need for greater productivity and reduced complexity in the area of soft-
ware development and implementation so that value to the business / stakeholders can be
delivered in the shortest possible time. No matter how familiar developers are with the low-
level APIs, working with various tools for faster and quicker development is always recom-
mended, so that the focus is on solving business problems and not on the technology.
This has been an underlying theme in a movement to change the way programmers ap-
proach for developing web or desktop applications using the Java platform.
Let's introduce Spring as a framework for RAD. Spring provides
Inversion of Control
(
IoC
) and a
DI
-based (
Dependency Injection
) simplified programming model that helps
developers to focus on the business logic and leave the rest to the framework. It delivers
enterprise services such as web services, JMS, database access, and so on by exposing a
POJO
-based (
Plain Old Java Object
) development, using template programming models,
which is naturally reusable in a variety of runtime environments.
In the last chapter, we covered the Java APIs provided by Neo4j, and in this chapter we
will discuss the best of both worlds, that is, Spring and Neo4j.
This chapter will cover the following topics:
• Spring Data philosophy
• First steps - Neo4jTemplate
• Spring Data repositories and entities
• Advanced mapping using AspectJ
