Neoclipse
From NeoWiki
Neoclipse is a subproject of Neo4j which aims to provide plugins for the Eclipse IDE in order to support the development of Neo4j applications.
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[edit] Prerequisites
Neoclipse requires Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede). Get it from the Eclipse download page.
Make sure to download a package that includes GEF by comparing them or download and install the All-in-one GEF package from the GEF download page. The manual install is performed by unzipping the archive and adding the files to your Eclipse install. GEF can also be installed from the GEF update site.
[edit] Installation
Until a binary distribution (or an update site) is available, you have to build Neoclipse yourself. There is a blog entry on Building Eclipse Plugins with Maven: Tycho by Tim O'Brien, using Neoclipse as an example.
When using the Plug-In Development version you can easily start Neoclipse or export it as a plugin from the *.product or plugin.xml files, opening them in the corresponding editor.
[edit] Configuration
After starting Eclipse (e.g. your runtime instance), you have to select the location of your existing Neoej database. In the Eclipse menu, go to Window -> Preferences -> Neo4j. Enter your Neo4j database directory.
[edit] Neo4j Perspective
Neoclipse comes with an own perspective, which initializes all necessary views. In the Eclipse menu, go to Window -> Open Perspective -> Other. Select the Neo4j perspective.
Of course, you can also open the Neo4j views independently from the perspective.
[edit] Neo4j Graph
The Neo4j Graph view visualizes the network of objects that are stored in Neo4j, e.g. it displays Nodes and their Relationships. After startup, the view is focussed on the reference node. Starting from there, the network can be browsed by double-clicking the connected nodes.
The properties of the currently selected node or relationship are shown in the Properties view,
and are also editable.
There are also some layout algorithms available that can be selected in the toolbar of the view.
Another sample shows the resulting graph when examining the Qi4j-Neo4j-EntityStore:
[edit] Limitations
As the Neoclipse project is still in its very early stages, several limitations exist.
- There is currently no "overflow protection". If the node in focus has too many relationships with other nodes, this might cause serious trouble for your Eclipse instance (e.g. slow performance, out of memory situations). So be careful. ;-)
- It could be useful to display more than one "hops" at a time -> to be implemented...
- It should be possible to connect to an already running Neo4j instance (similar to the remote console) -> work in progress with RemoteNeo ...
