Neo4j, the open source Java graph database, and Windows Azure

Recently I was travelling in Europe. I alwasy find it a pleasure to see a mixture of varied things nicely co-mingling together. Old and new, design and technology, function and form all blend so well together and there is no better place to see this than in Malmö Sweden at the offices of Diversify Inc., situated in a building built in the 1500’s with a new savvy workstyle. This also echoed at the office of Neo Technology in a slick and fancy incubator, Minc, situated next to the famous Turning Torso building and Malmö University in the new modern development of the city.

My new good friends, Diversify's Magnus Mårtensson, Micael Carlstedt, Björn Ekengren, Martin Stenlund and Neo Technology's Peter Neubauer hosted my colleague Anders Wendt from Microsoft Sweden, and me. The topic of this meeting was about Neo Technology’s Neo4j, open source graph database, and Windows Azure. Neo4j is written in Java, but also has a RESTful API and supports multiple languages. The database works as an object-oriented, flexible network structure rather than as strict and static tables. Neo4j is also based on graph theory and it has the ability to digest and work with lots of data and scale is well suited to the cloud. Diversify has been doing some great work getting Java to work with Windows Azure and has given us on the Interoperability team a lot of great feedback on the tools Microsoft is building for Java. They have also been working with some live customers and have released a new case study published in Swedish and an English version made available by Diversify on their blog.

I took the opportunity to take a video where we discuss the project, getting up on the cloud with Windows Azure and what's coming up on InteropBridges.tv,

Video Interview on Channel9: Neo4j the Open Source Java graph database and Windows Azure

Related to this effort and getting Java on Windows Azure there are a few more goodies to check out …

Video of the presentation (skip ahead to ~12 mins) by Magnus (blog post) and Björn (blog post) at the Norwegian Developer Conference (NDC) on hosting a Java application on Windows Azure and their experiences using them together.

Magnus and Björn also got to do a radio interview on  .NET Rocks (mp3)  on Windows Azure and Java.

I want to thank the guys for taking the time to do the interview, meet with customers, getting some business out of the way and also being fabulous hosts and showing me around town. I am grateful for your Swedish hospitality!

Resources:

http://java.interoperabilitybridges.com/cloud

http://www.windowsazure4j.org

http://neo4j.org

Jas Sandhu, Technical Evangelist, @jassand @openatmicrosoft