When graph databases came into the picture, testing was an unchartered territory and developers had a hard time ensuring that applications were configured in a failsafe manner. With the introduction of several highly efficient graph data stores, including Titan and Neo4j, several projects and frameworks sprung up in addition to the built-in ones. Neo4j in particular is ACID in nature, transaction-friendly and easy to set up, but a viable testing framework is always useful to ensure that your application runs as intended and helps to identify hidden bugs. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics related to the testing of Neo4j applications:
- Testing Neo4j applications with the GraphAware Framework
- Unit testing with the Java API and GraphUnit
- Performance testing
- Benchmarking performance with Gatling
- Scaling options for Neo4j applications
Neo4j as a graph database has several powerful and reliable features. Although it does include a basic unit testing module for embedded applications, the support for testing has still not made it into the core packages yet. You might not feel the need to test your applications if they seem to work on your local machines. However, it is always wise to have a rigorous testing scheme when your application is deployed on a larger or production scale or is handling critical data and huge traffic loads. So, when the need for testing arose for Neo4j, GraphAware came up with an advanced framework built on top of the core Neo4j libraries, but also included several advanced optimizations and features. Among them was the GraphAware server that allowed developers to build Representational State Transfer (REST) API applications on top of the Spring MVC framework, in place of the earlier used JAX-RS. They also included a GraphAware runtime that provided customized modules for improved transactions and continuous graph computations on both embedded and server environments. In addition, it also provides a GraphAware testing framework that was available only for Java-based development before. So, embedded instances of Neo4j in applications, Spring-MVC-controlled applications, and extension development can be easily tested using this framework. The GraphAware framework speeds up application development with Neo4j by extending a platform to developers to create generic or domain-specific functionalities, analytical applications, advanced graph computation algorithms, and much more. The GraphAware test framework provides the flexibility to easily test code that interacts with the Neo4j database in any way. If you are a developer who is writing or planning to write Java code for Neo4j applications, or are developing modules for the GraphAware Framework and its APIs, then this testing framework is going to make your life easier. To include this testing module in your project, you can use
Maven to specify it as a dependency in your pom.xml file:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.graphaware.neo4j</groupId>
<artifactId>tests</artifactId>
<version>2.1.4.17</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>Note
Check for the latest version number of the GraphAware Framework from http://graphaware.com/downloads/ when including the Maven dependency in the pom.xml file.
You can now work with unit, performance, and integration testing for your Neo4j applications.