Database Reference
In-Depth Information
ditional links to other data or functionality associated with the resource. The server under-
stands HTTP
GET
requests for retrieving data, and
POST
and
PUT
requests for modifying
or creating new resources. Simply put, Fielding proposed that these same principles could
be used for interacting with more general resources, such as those provided by application
services (here, read
web services
). These resources could thus also be offered, navigated,
and interacted with in a consistent and predictable manner by humans or systems if they
were designed to take advantage of some of these principles that helped the web grow into
what it is today.
RESTful-like web services (as opposed to SOAP, for example) are probably the de facto
web service implementation nowadays, and Neo4j can be counted among them. Neo4j's
REST implementation makes use of JSON as the default data format and offers a service-
orientated way of interacting with and manipulating the Neo4j resources (nodes and rela-
tionships).
For more information and a pragmatic treatment of the subject, see the excellent book
REST in Practice
by Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis, and Ian Robinson (O'Reilly, 2010).
JimWebberplayedaverylargepartinthedesignanddevelopmentoftheNeo4jRESTAPI
as well.
10.3.1. Neo4j server overview
Figure 10.4
depictsthecorecomponentsinvolvedinarunningNeo4jinservermode,along
with a client accessing the server using the standard, out-of-the-box REST API.
