appendix A Apache TinkerPop installation and overview
For the examples in this book, we use graph databases and tools from the Apache Software Foundation’s TinkerPop project (http://tinkerpop.apache.org/). The project’s software is properly called Apache TinkerPop or simply TinkerPop. This appendix delivers an overview of the TinkerPop project and explains how to install and configure the features needed to run the code examples in this book.
A.1 Overview
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 are a wide array of third-party libraries that are part of the TinkerPop ecosystem.
TinkerPop provides a standardized interface that is currently implemented by more than 20 separate database engines. This includes DBaaS (DataBase-as-a-Service) products (such as Amazon Neptune and Azure ComosDB), commercial offerings (such as DataStax Enterprise Graph and Neo4j), and open source software (such as TinkerGraph and JanusGraph).
Note A TinkerPop-enabled graph database is a database that implements at least the minimum APIs required to perform traversals via the Gremlin query language.
The TinkerPop project is made up of multiple different pieces. We have included the ones in this overview that we use throughout this book.