A Apache TinkerPop Installation and Overview
Throughout this book, we used graph databases and tools provided as part of the Apache TinkerPop project. This appendix provides delivers an overview of the Apache TinkerPop project and explains how to install and configure the features needed throughout this book.
A.1 Overview
Apache TinkerPop (a.k.a TinkerPop) is a top-level Apache Foundation project, which offers an open source and vendor agnostic graph computing framework with both transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) capabilities. In addition to the core libraries included as part of the project, there is a wide array of third party libraries that are part of the TinkerPop ecosystem. The homepage for the Apache TinkerPop project is found at http://tinkerpop.apache.org/.
TinkerPop gives a standardized interface that is currently implemented by 22 separate databases, comprising of DBaaS products, such as AWS Neptune and Azure ComosDB, commercial offerings such as DataStax Enterprise Graph and Neo4j, as well as open source alternatives such as TinkerGraph and JanusGraph.
Note
A TinkerPop-enabled graph database is a graph database that implements at least the minimum API’s required to perform traversals via the Gremlin query language.
The TinkerPop project is a graph computing framework that is made up of several parts including ones that we will use heavily throughout this book: