Neo-Viz

Neo-Viz is a tool for visualizing Neo data in the browser. It is a Sinatra application that uses Neo4j.rb to read data from a Neo database directory. It shows the data using Javascript in a browser.

Installing

The visualizer can be used stand-alone or embedded in a Rails application.

External Dependencies

The visualizer has an external dependency on coffee-script. It can be installed by:

# OS X
$ brew install coffee-script

# Linux
$ apt-get install coffee-script

Standalone

To use it standalone you must first get the code from the repository.

$ git clone git@github.com:AmanziTel/neo-viz.git
$ cd neo-viz

# To use it as is
$ rackup
[2011-06-23 07:48:34] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2011-06-23 07:48:34] INFO  ruby 1.8.7 (2011-05-23) [java]
[2011-06-23 07:48:34] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=64743 port=9292

# To install it as a gem
$ rake install
neo-viz 1.0.0 built to pkg/neo-viz-1.0.0.gem
neo-viz (1.0.0) installed

$ neo-viz
[2011-06-23 07:51:10] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2011-06-23 07:51:10] INFO  ruby 1.8.7 (2011-05-23) [java]
[2011-06-23 07:51:10] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=64864 port=1666

Embedding in Rails

To embed the visualizer in Rails, you first have to add it to your Gemfile.

# Gemfile
gem 'neo-viz', :git => 'git@github.com:AmanziTel/neo-viz.git'

Then you have to mount the route in routes.rb

# config/routes.rb
mount Neo::Viz::App => '/neo-viz'

You can now access it at e.g. http://localhost:3000/neo-viz.

Neo4j Database

The standalone version expects a db directory containing the usual Neo4j database files.

The embedded version uses the Neo4j database that has been configured for the embedding project.

Known issues

There is a problem running the Jasmine specs (/run-specs) on Windows if the "therubyrhino" gem is installed and you are using JRuby. On Windows we want to use the built-in JScript runtime but ExecJS chooses Rhino if it is installed.

Typical errors returned over HTTP when requesting a .coffee file:

throw Error("NativeException: org.mozilla.javascript.JavaScriptException:
    Error: too many ) on line 2 (<eval>#8)\n  (in c:/..../neo-viz/public/coffeescripts/canvas_util.coffee)")

A workaround is to uninstall the therubyrhino gem, but ofcourse it will be re-installed on every call to bundle. I can't figure out how to tell bundler not to load a specific gem when I'm on JRuby and Windows.

To do

Server

Make it possible to choose where that data comes from
Implement a command line interface for starting the server and selecting the data source.

Client

Group nodes, if there are too many to show.
bind and trigger with custom events

License

MIT, see LICENSE file

Changes

2011-12-20 Release 1.0.2 and fix of warnings (public folder)
2011-09-28 Added relationship filter
2001-09-28 Enabled embedding from AJAX-call (/embedded)
2011-06-23 Changed the namespace.
2011-06-23 Added depth to the traversal algorithm
2011-06-20 A query protocol for selecting only the relevant nodes
2011-06-20 Query protocol editor to select the relevant nodes to ask
2011-06-16 Views for showing only the relevant properties.
2011-06-16 Node filter
2011-06-16 Select number of nodes to show.
2011-06-14 Click to show detailed information.
Connect with the Server to get the data.
Fetch new data from the Server when a node is selected.
Limit the amount of nodes shown on the screen.
Show the properties of the nodes and relations.

AmanziTel / neo-viz

readme