Welcome to the Spring Data Graph Guide Book. Thank you for taking the time to get an in depth look into Spring Data Graph Library. Spring Data Graph is part of the Spring Data project which brings the convenient programming model of the Spring Framework to modern (mainly NoSQL) datastores. Spring Data Graph currently provides integration for the Neo4j Graph Database.

It was written by developers for developers. So hopefully we've created a documentation that is well received by our peers.

If you have any feedback to the Spring Data Graph Library or this book, please provide it via SpringSource JIRA, the SpringSource NoSQL Forum, github comments or issues or the Neo4j mailing list.

This book is presented as a duplex book, a term coined by Martin Fowler. A duplex book consists of at least two parts. The first part is an easily accessible narrative, that gives the reader an overview of the topics contained in the book. It contains lots of examples and more general discussion topics. This should be the only part of the book that is required to be read cover-to-cover.

We chose a tutorial describing the creation of a web applicaton (cineasts.net) that allows movie enthusiasts to find the favorites, rate them, connect with each other and enjoy social features. The application is running on Neo4j using Spring Data Graph and the well known Spring Web Stack.

The second part is the classic reference documentation containing the detailed information about the library. It discusses the programming model, the underlying assumptions, used toolset (like aspectj) as well as the APIs for the object-graph mapping and the template approach. The reference docs should be mainly used to look up concrete bits of information or to dig deeper into certain topics.