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…
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.
In part one our this building a chatbot series, we figured out how to use OpenNLP to “hear” what a user is saying and figure out both their intent and any entities they may have mentioned. Today we’re going to learn how to use Neo4j to talk back… like an impudent child.
The Awesome Procedures on Cypher (APOC) plugin is packed with goodies to make your life working with Neo4j easier. Sometimes you want to use these goodies in your own stored procedures…and you want to be able to test them. So how do we go about doing that exactly?
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The multiple-origin-multiple-destination (MOMD) problem is an NP-Hard problem sometimes seen in logistics planning where paths can stretch out really far. A far simpler problem presents itself when we limit the size of the paths. Now you may be wondering, why would we do that? Well… outside logistics we have plenty of graphs where relevance drops as we get further and further away. Think about an Article on Wikipedia. It has links to many other articles that are relevant, and those have links to other articles that are relevant to them but less relevant to our starting Article, and those have links to other articles that may be relevant to them, but have very little to do with our starting Article. I think if we keep going we end up in Philosophy or something like that.
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It’s time to add “visions of love” to our dating site. So far our posts have been just text status updates and while it is possible to fall in love with someone’s words, it’s harder if they look like the troll that lives under the bridge. So what’s the plan here? Well… like most databases out there, it’s not a good idea to store images in Neo4j. What we are going to store instead is a link to where the image resides… but we also don’t want to deal with having images all over our file system and then having to worry about storage space and replicating them, geographically distributing them for faster access, etc. Hosting images is a problem solved by the use of Content Delivery Networks. So let’s leverage one and build our feature.
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Up to this point, our users can send and receive messages, but we don’t have a way to show them all of their conversations, only one conversation at a time and they have to guess who messaged them before they can see those. Not very useful, what we need is a directory of all the conversations our user is part of. Let’s go ahead and add this feature to tie things together.
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A few days ago I taught the Neo4j Modeling class in Dallas… well my own version of the class since I teach some of the older material plus some of my blog posts. If you ever get the chance, take the class, it will open your eyes at what is possible when “third normal form” gets thrown out the window and a whole new world of possibilities is before you. The next modeling class I’m teaching will be at Graph Connect in NYC on September 20-21, 2018. I recommend you join me, unless of course you are looking at this after it occurred, then catch the next one.
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Now that our users can high five and low five each other, we want to show the other person those high fives and low fives. Well…do we really want to show the low fives? I’m not sure. A few years ago we talked about how to store the people who “swiped left” on a user (aka the “asholes” of Tinder). In this case, the user is not rejecting a person forever, they are just putting down one of their posts. If it’s two people who are competing for dates, then maybe the low five has a negative intent, but it would make the person who wrote the post feel they are doing something right. If the low five was from a potential mate, it could be a case of “negging” ( which is stupid and you should never do that to people), it could be in jest if it was from someone they already had a conversation with, it could just have negative intent or maybe a clumsy tap on the wrong button. We don’t really know.
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Max De Marzi 