Chapter 10. Other languages and tools
This chapter covers
- Using Java 7 and 8 rather than Scala with GraphX
- Status of Python and R interfaces to GraphX
- Using Apache Zeppelin and d3.js to visualize graphs as an alternative to Gephi
- Gaining almost-a-database capabilities with Spark Job Server
- Using GraphFrames
So far we’ve done only Scala, and for visualization we’ve used only Gephi. In this chapter, you’ll see how to use other languages supported by Spark. Although Spark supports other languages, their support from GraphX is limited at best. You’ll also see how to visualize graphs using d3.js and Apache Zeppelin, which is notebook software similar to Mathematica, IPython Notebook, and Jupyter. A notebook has the advantage of combining a REPL-like interactive interface with visualization in one place.
Throughout this book we’ve repeated that GraphX is not a graph database. Well, with the addition of the external tool Spark Job Server, which adds a REST interface to Spark, one can almost have a (very) lightweight database using GraphX.
Finally, you’ll see how to use the library GraphFrames, developed by some of the same people who developed GraphX, which makes querying graphs easier and faster than with GraphX.