GraphAcademy

Building Neo4j Applications with Spring Data

Getting Started

The Application Domain Model

Reading Data from Neo4j

Writing Data to Neo4j

Custom Cypher for Read and Write

Next Steps

Setup

In order to build an application with Spring Data Neo4j and connect to a Neo4j database, you will need a few foundational skills. Then you will set up the tools needed to work with the Spring Data Neo4j library.

Prerequisites

  1. Be able to write Java programs. While you can use Spring Data Neo4j with other JVM languages, this course will use Java.

  2. Familiarity with Spring projects. This course does not cover how Spring works at a general level, but you can learn more about them from Spring’s website.

  3. Complete the Neo4j Fundamentals and Cypher Fundamentals courses. You should be familiar with what a graph is and how to use the Cypher query language to read and write data to Neo4j.

Tools

We have created a repository for this course. It contains the starter code and resources you need.

This course defaults to Maven for dependency management, but the application could migrate to use Gradle instead. Users have valid preferences for either dependency management framework, but for simplicity’s sake, we chose to only pick one for this course.

A blank Neo4j Sandbox instance has also been created for you to use during this course.

You can open a Neo4j Browser window throughout this course by clicking the Toggle Sandbox button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

Get the code

You can use Gitpod as an online IDE and workspace for this workshop. It will automatically clone the workshop repository and set up your environment.

Open Gitpod workspace →

You will need to login with a Github, Gitlab, or Bitbucket account.

Alternatively, you can clone the repository and set up the environment yourself.

Develop on your local machine

  1. Verify your Java version. You will need Java 17 or higher. You can check your version by running the following command in your terminal window:
    java -version. To download Java, you can choose from many supported vendor options. For example, Azul’s JDK or hOpenJDK.

  2. Pick an IDE of your choice. If you don’t yet have a preference, you can download IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition or Visual Studio Code, are both excellent choices.

You do not need to create a Neo4j database as you will use the provided sandbox instance.

Lesson Summary

In this lesson, you reviewed any prerequisites needed to complete this course and set up your development environment to work with Spring Data and Neo4j.

In the next lesson, you will learn about the layers of the Spring Data Neo4j library.