On
the Neo4j.rb team we’ve always strived for good documentation. That hasn’t always been easy though!
However, we know that if we want other people to understand and to be able to use the awesome tools that we work on, we need documentation to introduce our tools and to provide good reference documentation. To that end, we’ve wanted to have a series of screencasts for a while to supplement our written documentation.
In the past, I created a single screencast to demonstrate setting up a Ruby on Rails application with
Neo4j. However I recently subscribed to the excellent
RubyTapas series produced by the equally excellent
Avdi Grimm.
Inspired by Avdi’s short episodes and polished style, I wanted to create a screencast series in easily digestible chunks. My goals were to have each of our episodes be:
- On just one topic
- Thorough on the topic it covers
- Useful for beginners
- Useful as a reference for experienced users
During the process of scripting and shooting I decided that I wanted to, as much as possible, use the same Ruby app in every episode. The purpose of this was for:
- Consistency
- Showing the
neo4j and neo4j-core gems as solid and useful tools
- Provide a publically available app which would be built over time for reference of the Neo4j gems
To the last point I’ve been building a Rails app (viewable in
this GitHub repository) for Asset Management which is intended to be a fully working open source solution which can be used and contributed to.
In the repository, each episode has an associated Git tag to go with it. This way there is a link from each episode to the point-in-time snapshot of the code. This is also so that those interested can follow along with the progress of a real-life app.
The Neo4j gem is not Rails-specific, so you can use other frameworks like
Sinatra or
Lotus, but because of the popularity of Ruby on Rails, we’ll be using it for this screencast series.
You can see the first three episodes of the screencast series below.
Episode #1 – Create a Neo4j Rails Application
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0P0pOP34Mw
In this first episode, we discuss how to set up a new Ruby on Rails app using Neo4j.
Episode #2 – Properties
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pCSQkHkPC8
In this second episode, we discuss properties on
ActiveNode models.
Episode #3 – Associations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veqIfIqtoNc
In this third episode, we discuss how to use associations in ActiveNode to manage relationships in Neo4j.
Stay tuned for more episodes ancd for more updates to the asset portal app!
Get more from Brian Underwood on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Want to test out Neo4j for yourself? Click below to download Neo4j and take it for a spin.
On the Neo4j.rb team we’ve always strived for good documentation. That hasn’t always been easy though!
However, we know that if we want other people to understand and to be able to use the awesome tools that we work on, we need documentation to introduce our tools and to provide good reference documentation. To that end, we’ve wanted to have a series of screencasts for a while to supplement our written documentation.
In the past, I created a single screencast to demonstrate setting up a Ruby on Rails application with Neo4j. However I recently subscribed to the excellent RubyTapas series produced by the equally excellent Avdi Grimm.
Inspired by Avdi’s short episodes and polished style, I wanted to create a screencast series in easily digestible chunks. My goals were to have each of our episodes be:
