Introducing the Graph App Gallery
In October 2017 we launched the Neo4j Graph Platform, and with it the concept of the Graph App. Since then a lot of Graph Apps have been created, but there’s been no easy way to discover them. Until now!
What is the Neo4j Graph Platform?
The Neo4j Graph Platform is built around the Neo4j native graph database and includes the following components:
- Neo4j Desktop is developers’ mission control console for all things Neo4j
- Neo4j Native Graph Database supports transactional applications and graph analytics
- Neo4j Graph Analytics helps data scientists gain new perspectives on data
- Data integration tools expedite distilling RDBMS data and other big data into graphs
- Graph visualization and discovery help communicate graph benefits throughout the organization
What is a Graph App?
A Graph App is a single-page application that takes advantage of some services provided by Neo4j Desktop — primarily the management of Neo4j Databases. That makes it super convenient to try out ideas.
The most well know Graph App is the Neo4j Browser, a graphical user interface (GUI) that can be used for adding data, running queries, creating relationships, and more
This is the only Graph App installed by default on the Neo4j Desktop.
In the 18 months since the launch, we’ve seen the creation of Graph Apps to solve all sorts of different problems. To name just a few:
- The Neo4j ETL Tool provides an easy to use UI for importing data from relational databases.
- Halin makes it easy to monitor your Neo4j servers and runs diagnostics over your configuration files.
- Neo4j Database Analyzer lets you get a quick understanding of the data structures in your Neo4j Database
Unless you keep a close eye on the Neo4j Developer Blog it’s hard to keep track of all the Graph Apps that have been released, so this week the Neo4j Labs team are happy to launch the first version of the Graph Apps Gallery.
The Graph Apps Gallery
The Graphs App Gallery is an online Graph App that aims to make it easier for users to discover Graph Apps. It contains Graph Apps that have been approved by the Neo4j Labs team.
If you have a Graph App that you’d like to us to add to the gallery, please send us an email to devrel@neo4j.com
At the moment it’s a HTML page that contains descriptions of Graph Apps and a deep link that will pop up the installer in the Neo4j Desktop for each of the apps.
Please note that the
neo4j://URLs for installing the Graph Apps don’t work yet on Linux, there please copy the install URL and use the Neo4j Desktop sidebar (see below) to install the individual Graph Apps.
We’ll evolve this over time based on the feedback we get.
How do I use the Graph Apps Gallery?
There are two ways that you can use the Graph Apps Gallery:
- You can navigate to it at install.graphapp.io/, and install all your Graph Apps directly from your web browser.
- You can install the Graph Apps Gallery as an ‘online graph app’ by copy/pasting
https://install.graphapp.iointo the ‘Install Graph Application’ box in the Neo4j Desktop, as shown in the print screen below.
Then you have the Gallery available within Neo4j Desktop.
This is also the general way to install Graph Apps by pasting their file, npm-repository or online-URL in this field.
Note that you will need to be connected to the internet for the graph app to work — it does not download anything locally.
We hope you like it and have fun trying out the various Graph Apps. If you have any feedback or questions, let us know!
