Remoting Experiments for Neo4j's Cypher using MessagePack and WebSockets

Usage

• right now queries are hard coded in clients

    ./server.sh [db-dir]
    node ws-client.js

Sample Session

    Request
    {"query","start n=({ids}) return n", "params": {"ids" : [1,2]},"stats": true,"result":true}

    Response:
    ["n"]
    [{"id":1,"data":{"name":"foo"}}]
    [{"id":2,"data":{"name":"bar"}}]
    {"time": 0, "rows": 2, "bytes": 100}

Ideas:

Write a Cypher only endpoint for Neo4j that uses a fast transport and serialization across multiple client languages. Cypher Results are streamed from the server. Transaction support. Multithreaded clients and servers Client examples in ruby, python, php, c#, c, javascript, java, scala, clojure, erlang Public installation on Heroku for testing

Serialization

Nodes, Relationships and Paths are converted into maps and lists for serialization recursively

Node : { id : id, [data : {foo:bar}]}
Relationship : { id : id, start: id, end: id, type : "FOO",  [data : {foo:bar}]}
Path {start: node, nodes: [nodes], relationships [relationships], end: node, lenght: 1}

Header with Columns, optional Footer with time, bytes, tx-id, error, exception, rows, update-counts for nodes, relationships, properties.

Compactness

• leave off footer, enable when needed
• ignore results (fire & forget)

Transactions

• provide a "tx" parameter with begin, commit,rollback
• tx-id will be reported in footer
• provie a tx-id parameter with the transaction id
• transaction will be suspended, resumed per request (if a tx-id is provided) and finished and removed at rollback/commit

Serialization

• fast, lightweight, portable

MessagePack

• messagepack-lite (copied sources and fixed some performance issues) ** original source: https://bitbucket.org/sirbrialliance/msgpack-java-lite

Transport

• fast, lightweight, portable

WebSockets

Java

• uses netty 4

Running as Neo4j Kernel Extension

The cypher server is now packaged as a Neo4j Kernel Extension. So if you build the jar with mvn package and drop the jar in your neo4j environment either in /server/plugins or your classpath/build repository for embedded development, the extension will be started and listen on port 5555 by default.

The server starts by default with 1 Thread, the multiple threads don't work yet with transactions (wrong transactions resumed in the wrong thread) but for non-transactional access the single server works fine. Threads and port can be configured in neo4j.properties or in the config-map passed to the database.

   cypher_remoting_address=:5555 # a hostname and port 
   cypher_remoting_threads=1 # number of threads 1 to 10

Node.js

• uses "ws" npm module
• simple sample client

Resources

Websockets

• Netty:
• Node.js

MessagePack

• http://msgpack.org/
• used msgpack implementation: https://bitbucket.org/sirbrialliance/msgpack-java-lite/overview
• https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack-java/blob/master/src/test/java/org/msgpack/TestSimpleArrays.java
• http://blog.andrewvc.com/why-arent-you-using-messagepack discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571729

Alternatives:

• Spread http://www.spread.org/ Spread, a asynchronous messaging protocol
• Netty: https://netty.io/ high performance NIO server/client, only for Java/JVM
• Storm (uses ZeroMQ): http://storm-project.net/ Distributed and fault-tolerant realtime computation: stream processing, continuous computation, distributed RPC
• Thrift: http://thrift.apache.org/ Code generator and RPC middleware for cross-language client-server applications
• BSON: http://bsonspec.org/
• Protocol Buffers http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/