Last week I was helping out a user who was seeing lots of error messages in their application logs when connecting to Neo4j Aura. So I did like any good developer and I asked the all knowing all powerful google how to cleanse your Aura, and guess what it told me…
In the last blog post, we created the Schema of our application and that was pretty dry stuff. It doesn’t get much better yet, so feel free to go do something more useful with your time, but before you go let me ask you a question. Did you ever have someone you really liked, I’m talking about the kind of person you thought about constantly, who made your heart skip a beat. The kind of person you knew was “the one“. But…
Some of you may be too young to remember this, but writing your application logic in Stored Procedures was all the rage back in the day (PG devs you wouldn’t understand). That is mostly because they were typically written by consultants from IBM and Oracle that cost a fortune and told you to do it this way. Eventually people wised up and realized they (both) sucked and as all things in Software Development, the pendulum swung the other way and people started treating databases like dumb storage. A 15 year old blog post from Jeff Atwood lists some of the problems:
Question: Do you want to get Rich?
I’ll answer for you: “Yes!”
Follow along with this blog series and if it doesn’t make you rich, you can go back to your youtube videos, you can go back to watching Tiger King on Netflix, you can go back to your crappy life. Let’s continue.
Question: Are you poor? dumb? ugly? do you make bad decisions?
I’ll answer for you: “Yes!”.
If you were not poor, you would be on a yacht in Ibiza and not reading my blog. If you were not dumb you would be doing whatever it is smart people do, I wouldn’t know but I’m pretty sure it’s not reading my blog. If you were not ugly you would be in Paris or Milan murdering the runway instead of reading my blog. If you didn’t make bad decisions you wouldn’t have decided to read my blog which just made you feel sad about your life. See where I’m going with this?
Neo4j 4.0 has been out for a few months now, but since the whole world is on lock down, it didn’t get a chance to make a grand entrance at Graph Connect 2020. It comes loaded with some great new features but I’m not here to tell you about all that. There are plenty of better places for it. Instead I’m going to tell you about an old feature that got a bit of an update. Unmanaged Extensions. Yup, those things have been with us since dinosaurs roamed the earth and they are still in Neo4j 4.0. Why you ask? Because they let you turn Neo4j into an HTTP API style service making it super easy to integrate into your existing infrastructure. It’s still one of my favorite ways to build Neo4j applications because once you have the documentation of the API locked down, you can crank out the endpoints quickly and the service is done before you know it.
Max De Marzi 