Database Reference
In-Depth Information
The browser will contain two parts:
• The
DOM
, with the actual data. This contains the graph data as part of
the total web page.
• The
JavaScript
part, with the browser framework as well as the graph
visualization library (one of the ones mentioned before, possibly) and
perhaps some other application code.
The application server will be on the other end of the Internet connection to provide
the application interface to the user. This server will typically have some business
logic hosted on it, but will most probably also have to integrate with a database
management system like Neo4j.
The Neo4j server in the back will be serving up result sets based on queries
generated by the aforementioned business logic.
This architecture allows us to understand how any of these libraries would need to
be hooked into our application. With that, we will now turn our attention to some
more packaged visualization solutions that can be used in combination with Neo4j.
Visualization solutions
We make a distinction between visualization libraries and visualization solutions
foraveryspeciicreason:theyserveverydifferentpurposes.
Many members of the Neo4j user community have been developing their own
application-speciicvisualizationapplicationsthataretypicallyverycustomized.
Theyaimtosolveaveryspeciicvisualizationproblem,andusealibrarytodoso,
because it allows them to tweak the visualization to their liking at the expense of
a bit more work.
There are, however, also those users of the Neo4j Graph Database Management
System that require a more general, less optimized but more readily available
visualization solution. For those users, visualization "solutions" are a better option,
as they are typically readily available, off-the-shelf solutions that require little or
no customization to start adding value. These are the solutions that we will be
discussing in this section of our topic. So, let's take a look.
Note that we will be discussing these solutions in alphabetical order; there is no
preferenceororderdisplayedinthesepages,asweirmlybelievethatmostof
these tools are very complementary to one another.
