REST::Neo4p – PERL版本的”OGM”
This is a guest post by Mark A. Jensen, a DC area bioinformatics scientist. Thanks a lot Mark for writing the impressive Neo4j Perl library and taking the time to documenting it thoroughly.
You might call REST::Neo4p an “Object-Graph Mapping”. It uses the Neo4j REST API at its foundation to interact with Neo4j, but what makes REST::Neo4p “Perly” is the object oriented approach. Creating node, relationship, or index objects is equivalent to looking them up in the graph database and, for nodes and relationships, creating them if they are not present. Updating the objects by setting properties or relationships results in the same actions in the database, and returns errors when these actions are proscribed by Neo4j. At the same time, object creation attempts to be as lazy as possible, so that only the portion of the database you are working with is represented in memory.
The idea is that working with the database is accomplished by using Perl5 objects in a Perl person’s favorite way. Despite the modules’ “REST” namespace, the developer should almost never need to deal with the actual REST calls or the building of URLs herself. The design uses the amazingly complete and consistent self-describing information in the Neo4j REST API responses to keep URLs under the hood.
PS: OGM是相对于ORM而言的，提供了基于REST接口的底层封装。