A JPA Facade for Neo4J

NoSQL is obviously a hot topic in the enterprise these days, at least at the water cooler if not in the production data center just yet. Naturally, the question of how to use NoSQL databases in Java EE applications (specifically existing Java EE 5 and Java EE 6 applications) comes up all too often. As it so turns out there are a number of very interesting initiatives out there to radically simplify the usage of NoSQL databases in Java EE applications by creating JPA based facades over them. Such efforts include EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, EasyCassandra and the like.

Amresh Singh, a core contributor of one such project, Kundera, recently wrote a pretty insightful blog post on creating a JPA facade over the popular graph database Neo4J (Kundera already supports Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Redis, etc). It's an interesting read - Amresh talks about the challenges and design decisions behind such an inherently intricate effort.

Incidentally, I recently presented at DevNexus on the topic of using NoSQL in Java EE via JPA and CDI. Stay tuned for that trip report, slide deck and code examples...