The Spring Data Graph project, as part of the Spring Data initiative, aims to simplify development with graph databases. Like JPA, it uses annotations on simple POJO beans. The annotations activate the AspectJ aspects in the Spring Data Graph framework, mapping the POJO entities and their fields to nodes, relationships, and properties in the graph database.

Spring Data Graph allows anytime to drop down to the Neo4j-API level to execute functionality with the highest performance possible. For Integration of Neo4j and Grails/GORM please refer to the Neo4j grails plugin.

To get started with a simple application, only the basic annotations (see Section 19.2, “Defining node entities”) and the additional aspect-introduced entity methods (see Section 19.9, “Introduced methods”) are required. Basic knowledge of graph stores is needed to access advanced functionality like traversals.