Using Neo4j in Grails without the Grails neo4j-plugin and GORM

Question

Is it possible to use Grails to provide Controllers and Views, Neo4j as the database and (self written) domain classes that wrap the database access and CRUD operations without the neo4j plugin?

The data I have (~10^6 Nodes, 10^7 Relationships) are very well suited to be modeled by a graph DB. The Nodes and the relationships both need to have labels and properties so they can be accessed through traversal methods that only go via certain paths in the graph. I want to use grails for the web interface because I just starting learning programming a few weeks ago and it appears to be a pretty good point to begin.

From what I understand until know is that with the Grails Neo4j-plugin, it is not possible to set relationships with properties and labels. It seems very appealing and easy to write the classes that relate to the data using the plain Neo4j-Java-API.

Additionally, if my database is already structured in a way that directly relates to Objects, what is the benefit of using ORM (or object-graph-mapping in this case)?

Answer 1

Unless you require Grails scaffolding and you're not depending on domain classes in Grails you can go without the GORM plugin and do the dirty work on your own. Add the neo4j jar dependencies to your BuildConfig.groovy and expose the GraphDatabaseService and optionally the ExecutionEngine to your application context, see http://grails.org/doc/latest/guide/spring.html#springdslAdditional.

In the near future there will be 2.0 version of the Neo4j GORM plugin that uses labels and relies solely on Cypher. Relationship properties is high on the list after this release.